
Brief stories about the 

UNITED NATIONS 

where live, work, and fight 
One Thousand Million Friends of 

THE UNITED STATES 



This pamphlet has been prepared by the staff of the 
Office of War Information to provide background 
material on the 27 United Nations at war, with the 
United States, against the Axis. The contents may 
be quoted with or without acknowledgment. The 
material in the stories has been carefully checked and 
approved by the embassies and legations concerned- 


Gov’t Deposi 


*211642 

^cessions DMsinn 





PAGE 


CONTENTS 


The Atlantic Charter . IV 

Declaration hy United Nations . V 

The Thousand Million . 1 

Australia . 2 

Belgium . 3 

Canada . 5 

China . 7 

Costa Rica . 9 

Cuba . 11 

Czechoslovakia .. 13 

Dominican Republic . 15 

Greece . 16 

Guatemala . .. 17 

Haiti . 18 

Honduras . 20 

India . 21 

Luxembourg . 23 

Mexico . 24 

The Netherlands . 25 

New Zealand . 29 

Nicaragua . 30 

Norway . 31 

Panama . 33 

The Philippines . 34 

Poland . 36 

El Salvador . 37 

South Africa . 39 

The Soviet Union . 40 

The United Kingdom . 42 

Yugoslavia . 44 
































THE ATLANTIC CHARTER 

The President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister, 
Mr. Churchill, representing His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom, 
being met together, deem it right to make known certain common principles in 
the national policies of their respective countries on which they base their hopes 
for a better future for the world. 


1 Their countries seek no aggrandize¬ 
ment, territorial or other. 

2 They desire to see no territorial 
changes that do not accord with the 
freely expressed wishes of the peoples 
concerned. 

3 They respect the right of all peoples 
to choose the form of government 
under which they will live; and they 
wish to see sovereign rights and self- 
government restored to those who have 
been forcibly deprived of them. 

4 They will endeavor, with due respect 
for their existing obligations, to further 
the enjoyment by all States, great or 
small, victor or vanquished, of access, 
on equal terms, to the trade and to the 
raw materials of the world which are 
needed for their economic prosperity. 

5 They desire to bring about the fullest 
collaboration between all nations in 
the economic field with the object of 
securing, for all, improved labor stand¬ 
ards, economic advancement and social 
security. 

August 14, 1941. 

iv 


6 After the final destruction of the Nazi 
tyranny, they hope to see established 
a peace which will afford to all nations 
the means of dwelling in safety within 
their own boundaries, and which will 
afford assurance that all the men in all 
the lands may live out their lives in 
freedom from fear and want. 

7 Such a peace should enable all men 
to traverse the high seas and oceans 
without hindrance. 

8 They believe that all of the nations of 
the world, for realistic as well as spiritual 
reasons, must come to the abandonment 
of the use of force. Since no future 
peace can be maintained if land, sea or 
air armaments continue to be employed 
by nations which threaten, or may 
threaten, aggression outside of their 
frontiers, they believe, pending the es¬ 
tablishment of a wider and permanent 
system of general security, that the dis¬ 
armament of such nations is essential. 
They will likewise aid and encourage 
all other practicable measures which 
will lighten for peace-loving peoples the 
crushing burden of armaments. 

* FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT 
WINSTON S. CHURCHILL 


DECLARATION BY UNITED NATIONS 


A Joint Declaration by the United States of America , the United Kingdom of Great Britain and 
Northern Ireland , the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , China , Australia , Belgium , Canada , 
Co-sta Cuba , Czechoslovakia , Dominican Republic , El Salvador , Greece , Guatemala , Haiti , 
Honduras , India , Luxembourg , Netherlands , JVW Zealand, Nicaragua , Norway , Panama , Poland , 
•SWA Africa , Yugoslavia, 

The Goveraments signatory hereto, 

Having subscribed to a common program of purposes and principles embodied in 
the Joint Declaration of the President of the United States of America and the Prime 
Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland dated August 
14, 1941, known as the Atlantic Charter, 

Being convinced that complete victory over their enemies is essential to defend life, 
liberty, independence and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice 
in their own lands as well as in other lands, and that they are now engaged in a common 
struggle against savage and brutal forces seeking to subjugate the world, 

DECLARE: 

(1) Each Government pledges itself to employ its full resources, military or eco¬ 
nomic, against those members of the Tripartite Pact and its adherents with which such 
government is at war. 

(2) Each Government pledges itself to cooperate with the Governments signatory 
hereto and not to make a separate armistice or peace with the enemies. 


V 


The foregoing declaration may be adhered to by other nations which are, or which 
may be, rendering material assistance and contributions in the struggle for victory over 
Hitlerism. 


Done at Washington 
January First, 1942 


The United States of America 
by Franklin D. Roosevelt 
The United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern 
Ireland 

by Winston S. Churchill 
On behalf of the Government of the Union of 
Soviet Socialist Republics 
Maxim Litvinoff 
Ambassador 

National Government of the Republic of China 
Tse Vung Soong 
Minister for Foreign Affairs 
The Commonwealth of Australia 
by R. G. Casey 
The Kingdom of Belgium 

by C te - R. v. d. Straten 
Canada 

by Leighton McCarthy 
The Republic of Costa Rica 
by Luis Fernandez 
The Republic of Cuba 

by Aurelio F. Concheso 
Czechoslovak Republic 
by V. S. Hurban 
The Dominican Republic 
by J. M. Troncoso 
The Republic of El Salvador 

by C. A. Alfaro v 

The Kingdom of Greece 

by Cimon G. Diamantopoulos 
The Republic of Guatemala 

by Enrique Lopez-Herrarte 
La Republique d’Haiti 
par Fernand Dennis 


The Republic of Honduras 
by Julian R. Caceres 
India 

by Girja Shankar Bajpai 
The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg 
by Hugues le Gallais 
The Kingdom of the Netherlands 
A. Loudon 

Signed on behalf of the Government of the Domin¬ 
ion of New Zealand 
by Frank Langstone 
The Republic of Nicaragua 
by Leon De Bayle 
The Kingdom of Norway 

by W. Munthe Morgenstierne 
The Republic of Panama 
by Jaen Guardia 
The Republic of Poland 
by Jan Ciechanowski 
The Union of South Africa 
by Ralph W. Close 
The Kingdom of Yugoslavia 
by Constantin A. Fotitch 

On June 5, 1942, the Mexican Minister for For¬ 
eign Affairs informed the Secretary of State of the 
formal adherence of the GOVERNMENT OF 
MEXICO to the Declaration by United Nations 
of January 1, 1942. 

On June 10, 1942, the President of the Philippine 
Commonwealth informed 'the Secretary of State 
of the formal adherence of the GOVERNMENT 
OF THE PHILIPPINES to the Declaration by 
United Nations of January 1, 1942. 


vi 




THE THOUSAND MILLION 


T HESE are the lands of the thousand million 
people—and more—our allies and our 
friends. The purpose of the articles that follow is 
to tell, in a few words, something about the thou¬ 
sand million and their 27 countries, pledged with 
us to fight in a great alliance against the Axis on 
all the continents and in all the seas. 

The thousand million live in tropic Caribbean 
ports; in Chinese mountain villages; in Britain’s 
seaswept countryside and in the incredible vastness 
of Russia. They live in the darkened streets of 
Dutch and Polish, Czech and Belgian towns where 
the invader’s sentry hammers at the door. 

Today they share the common destiny of the 
people who live all over America—in Concord or 
near Louisville, east of Wyoming or west of Santa 
Fe. 

Their roll is long: They live in Yugoslavia, 
Australia, Nicaragua, India, Panama, Haiti, Cuba, 
Costa Rica, South Africa, the Dominican Re¬ 
public, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, the 
Philippines—in Canada and Luxembourg and 
Mexico and Greece. From Norway to New Zea¬ 
land they stretch across the world. 

Our destiny is bound together by the Declara¬ 
tion by United Nations signed at Washington on 
New Year’s Day, 1942. We are determined to 
win this war with the overwhelming might of our 
combined strength—and thereafter to establish a 
new age of freedom for all men on this earth. 

The world already knows these men of the 
United Nations: The Anzacs—Australians and 
New Zealanders—who go into fire and havoc 
singing: “Waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda, 
you’ll come a-waltzing, Matilda, with me.” 
Cossacks from the Don and young Red Army tank 
turret gunners who have met and smashed the 
best the Nazi Wehrmacht could offer. 

Soldiers of China who after 5 years in the blaze 
and darkness of war remain unconquered because 
they will not be conquered. The Dutch of Rotter¬ 
dam and Java who lacked all things but valor. 
Canadians from the Airdrome of Democracy. 
Bearded Sikhs of India who have fought their way 
over the top of Africa and through half the jungles 
of the East. 

The Poles and Czechs who crossed the wreck of 


Europe to fight again in spite of Hell and Himmler. 
Evzones —men of Greece—who stood and died on 
hills where sunlight catches marble columns known 
to Greeks who 25 centuries ago created their 
unalterable dream of liberty. 

Norwegians who took death for tribute in Trond¬ 
heim fiord, South Africans who taught the world 
what “Commando” means. Chetniks of Yugo¬ 
slavia’s undefeatable mountain battalions. 

Add also Filipinos, and Americans from New 
Mexico ranches and Ohio river towns, Missourians, 
Texans, Californians, men of Kentucky, Wisconsin, 
Lincoln’s Illinois, who have given immortality to 
the words: Wake, Bataan, Corregidor. And Brit¬ 
ons who on the cobbled streets of Calais and 
after Dunkirk’s beach faced alone the Fascists 
of the Western World. 

These are only a few. There are many more, 
and they are not all soldiers or sailors or airmen. 
There are also the people of the invaded countries 
who by torches, fires, and codes guide the United 
Nations fliers on their bombing raids to the enemy’s 
farthest arsenals. There are the men and women 
of the United Nations who have gone about their 
customary occupations while havoc burst around 
them. There are the stokers in the holds of cargo 
ships who have seen death as a familiar and gone 
back to face him again. There are the thousands 
who in forge and field, in Europe, Asia, Africa, 
and the Americas, provide the sinews of victory. 

Victory for the United Nations cannot be won 
by resistance alone. We know it cannot be won 
by the quaking dream of isolation. We know it 
cannot be won by proudly licking our wounds. 

Victory will be won—and victory will be pre¬ 
served afterward—only by strength of United 
Nations arms and the fighting spirit of the thousand 
million. 

There is no other road to freedom. We can none 
of us travel it alone. We must all travel it together. 
We must save our friends if we would save our own. 
It is from foreign shores that the tyrants strike their 
blows at us, and it is on those shores that we are 
striking back. 

The people of the United Nations do not under¬ 
estimate the size of the task that lies ahead. Nor 
are they dismayed by it. Today their battle fronts 


i 


4 


are joined all over the planet, and their home fronts 
are making the combat weapons the fighters on 
those joined fronts will use. 

In the great alliance of the United Nations it is 
not a question of any one of us sending our friends 
what we can spare from our own defenses. We 
know that we shall none of us be safe until the 
enemy is defeated—everywhere in the world. 
Our problem is to destroy the forces of the Nazis, 
their hangers-on, and the Japanese lords of 
slaughter if we do not want them to destroy us. 


Whoever destroys any of those forces gives life to 
all of us. In our united war it does not matter 
whether the cannon was made in Springfield or in 
Coventry or Melbourne. It does not matter 
whether it is fired by men from Liverpool or 
Kuibishev or Chungking. When the gun throws 
back the enemy’s line in Russia, when the Nazi 
submarine is sunk, when the smashed Japanese 
plane comes down, the cause of the United Nations 
is advanced: there is an increased promise of 
freedom for all people—everywhere in the world. 


AUSTRALIA 


1 IKE BRITAIN, Australia has become a for- 
J tress of the United Nations, a springboard for 
attack against the Axis. In her short history 
Australia has never before been threatened by in¬ 
vasion. Now for the first time enemy bombers are 
over her homes, enemy ships are skulking in neigh¬ 
boring waters. 

Australia is a young and virile nation. For 154 
years the Australians fought against the hard facts 
of their own geography. They conquered a con¬ 
tinent, and the continent made a tough and 
resourceful people. 

When Australia declared war on Germany on 
September 3, 1939, she had no regular army but 
a skeleton force of about 4,000 commissioned and 
noncommissioned officers. Her 7 million people, 
scattered over a continent the size of the United 
States, were busy raising wheat, sheep, and catde 
and shipping their wheat, wool, meat, and dairy 
products to the markets of the world. A small but 
efficient heavy industry has been built on rich 
mineral deposits and cheap sources of power. Since 
that day in 1939, Australia has beaten her plow¬ 
shares into swords with remarkable speed and 
efficiency. 

Conscription of Manpower 

All men between the ages of 18 and 65 are now 
eligible either for military service or for labor corps 
work. The armed forces have been built up to 
about 550,000 out of a population of about 7 
million. Australian air squadrons have been in 
active service in Britain, in Libya, in Malaya, and 


in the Netherlands East Indies, and Australian 
expeditionary forces have fought with the British 
and New Zealand forces in Greece, Crete, Libya, 
Malaya, Syria, and Iraq. Ships of the Royal 
Australian Navy have served with distinction from 
the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. 

The drain of manpower has caused an acute 
labor shortage. As a result many thousands of 
women and over-age men have gone into factories, 
offices, and civilian defense forces. 

Although before the war only one Australian in 
five depended on industry for his livelihood, 
Australia is now producing quantities of weapons. 
Her steel works at Newcastle and Port Kembla 
are among the largest in the Empire and turn out 
more than 1,800,000 tons a year. But the muni¬ 
tions industry had to be started from scratch. 
Plants shot up, workers learned new skills, and, 
with the help of some Lend-Lease machine tools 
from the United States, Australia is making 
bombers, fighters, antiaircraft guns, machine guns, 
shells and ammunition of all sizes, mines, tor¬ 
pedoes, and precision instruments. Tanks are 
also beginning to roll off the assembly lines. War¬ 
ships have been built in Australian shipyards. 

The war has changed the pattern of the daily 
lives of Australian men and women. An outdoor, 
sporting people, Australians used to take to the 
roads each week-end. The gasoline ration has long 
since driven all pleasure cars off the roads. Aus¬ 
tralians are also doing without most of the clothing, 
household goods, and domestic comforts they used 
to import. The people are working as they have 


2 




never worked before, and they have always been 
a hard-working people. 

What Is Australia? 

Like the people of the United States, the Aus¬ 
tralians tamed a continent—but a continent far 
less friendly than our own. Our periods of coloni¬ 
zation are roughly parallel. Australia has a federal 
system of government like our own, composed of 
six states and two territories; she has a written con¬ 
stitution patterned on ours, a Parliament of two 
houses, the Senate and House of Representatives, 
whose members are elected on the same principle 
as our Congress. Her state and local governments 
run their own affairs much as ours do. But the 
Prime Minister and his Cabinet follow the British 
pattern of sitting as elected members of Parliament, 
with responsibility to that body. The Governor- 
General of Australia, appointed by the King on 
the advice of his Australian Ministers, is the per¬ 
sonal representative of the British Crown, and like 
the King has prestige rather than political power. 

The English, Scotch, Welsh, and Irish pioneers 
who settled the new continent and whose descend¬ 
ants now make up 98 percent of the population had 
to travel 12,000 miles from home. They found 
hospitable harbors and fertile coastal grasslands; 
but behind these, they came up against a vast 
plateau, hot, dry, and seemingly without end. 
Forty percent of Australia is so hot and so dry that 
it cannot support settlement. On the fringes of this 
forbidding wasteland, the Settlers went to work 
and made Australia the greatest wool producer, 


the fifth largest wheat producer, and one of the 
largest meat, butter, and cheese producers in the 
world. 

These riches pouring from Australia’s fine har¬ 
bors have fed and clothed millions of people in all 
parts of the world. Six out of every ten Australians 
live in the harbor cities, handling the great export 
trade and working Australia’s industries. 

Today these cities are utterly changed. Their 
pavements echo to the tramp of United Nations 
troops. Their airports hum with the traffic of 
United Nations planes. The cities are “browned” 
out at night, but the war factories and shipyards 
roar on through the darkness. 



BELGIUM 


B ELGIUM, a victim of German aggression in 
both great wars of our century, has been an 
occupied country since May 1940. Sweeping 
across the borders without warning, Hitler’s gray 
hordes overwhelmed a small nation which had 
made scrupulous effort to remain neutral in a 
Europe at war. An army of more than 500,000— 
one Belgian out of every sixteen was in it—fought 
gallantly until German numbers and German air- 
power made further resistance useless. 

King Leopold III, who led his troops, is now a 

2 


prisoner of war at Laeken. But the Belgian 
Cabinet had gone to France before the army 
surrendered and from London still directs colonial 
affairs and carries on the war as one of the United 
Nations. Many Belgian units are fighting with 
the British army. Many of Belgium’s merchant 
ships have been sunk, but the rest carry supplies 
for her allies. 

Belgium is the most densely populated country in 
Europe, averaging 712 people to every square mile. 
Although only a little larger than the state of 

3 


471692 *— 4 : 





Maryland—11,775 square miles—it has a popula¬ 
tion of 8,386,000, more than four times as large as 
that of Maryland. As a result of this overcrowding, 
the Belgian people have always had to be in¬ 
dustrious and thrifty to survive. The cities of 
Brussels, Antwerp, Bruges, and Ghent have been 
celebrated for great artisans and fine craftsmen 
since the Middle Ages. 

While there is excellent agricultural land in 
Belgium, three times as many people work in fac¬ 
tories as work on farms, and the country in peace¬ 
time imports much of its food. The tradition of 
commerce and manufacturing is an old one: Ant¬ 
werp has been a great port for centuries and the 
rich coal supply of the Walloon region stokes the 
furnaces of industry. With this coal and imported 
iron ore Belgium in 1937 produced 3,770,000 metric 
tons of steel. Other large industries are textile- 
making and cement manufacture. Glass from Bel¬ 
gium shines in the windowpanes of many of Eng¬ 
land’s homes. Before the war, Antwerp and the 
Flemish provinces ranked first in the number of 
diamond cutters in the world. 

The people of Belgium speak two languages: 
French in the southern areas, Flemish in the north. 



Both languages are spoken in Brussels, the capital, 
a splendid metropolitan city of 900,000. The 
bombing of Brussels marked the opening of the 
German invasion of 1940. 

Romans, Franks, Burgundians, Spaniards, Aus¬ 
trians, Frenchmen, and Dutchmen have at various 
times held sovereignty over Belgian soil. But out 
of Belgian culture have come such artists as Rubens, 
the van Eyck brothers, Memling, Van Dyke, and 
Breughel, and the poet Maeterlinck. Modern 
Belgium became an independent nation in 1830; 
the King had to obey the constitution and the 
laws made by the two-house Parliament. The 
major powers of Europe guaranteed Belgium’s 
borders by treaty. It was this treaty that Germany 
violated in 1914. In 1946, Germany again broke 
her written promise not to attack Belgium. 

Belgium has one great colony in Africa: the 
Belgian Congo. The Congo has an area of almost 
a million square miles and a native population of 
about 14,000,000. From the fabulously rich 
Congo come copper, gold, ivory, tin, diamonds, 
palm oil, and more than h*alf of the world’s uranium 
ore from which radium is derived. Many sup¬ 
plies vital to the allied cause are being shipped from 
the Congo under the direction of the government- 
in-exile. 

Belgium, occupied, oppressed, poorly fed by her 
conquerors, still resists. Scores of underground 
organizations sabotage German efforts at pacifica¬ 
tion. Peasants by torches and fires and secret code 
guide the British fliers on their bombing flights. 
More than fifty underground newspapers are 
printed and secretly circulated by Belgian patriots 
whose fate, if caught, is death. And from the far 
Congo went Belgian native militia a year ago to 
help the British smash Italy in Abyssinia and 
restore Haile Selassie to the throne. This daunt¬ 
less colonial army, in which black troops played a 
prominent part, traveled 2,500 miles through the 
damp groves of the jungle, across veldt and desert 
to the mountains of inner Ethiopia where they 
forced the surrender of nine Italian generals and 
their troops. 


4 








CANADA 


Area. —3,694,900 square miles (roughly the same size as the United States 
including her territories and dependencies). Population. —11,419,000 (less than 
that of New York State). Capital. —Ottawa, Ontario. Principal cities.— 
Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Hamilton, Quebec, Ottawa. Form of 
government. —The Dominion of Canada is a self-governing British nation. Both 
her federal and nine provincial governments conform to the British pattern. The 
Parliament consists of a House of Commons, whose membership is elected for five- 
year terms, and a Senate whose members are appointed for life. The present Prime 
Minister is the Right Honorable William Lyon Mackenzie King. The representa¬ 
tive of the King is a Governor-General, at present the Earl of Athlone. Provincial 
premiers and legislatures have much the same powers as our state governments. 
Flag. —Red ground with Union Jack in upper left-hand corner, Canadian Arms 
in center. 

War contributions (July 1942).— Army: 475,000; Navy: 34,000; Air Force: 
120,000. Total volunteers for overseas: 500,000. Casualties: 5,500 (to the end of 
June 1942). Food: 2,000,000,000 pounds (bacon, wheat, flour, cheese, eggs, 
honey). Raw materials: Aluminum, nickel, asbestos, zinc, copper, lead, platinum, 
mica, sulphur, gold, pitchblende, wood pulp. Industrial production: All kinds of 
munitions and war equipment. With one-eleventh the population and one-sixteenth 
the national income, Canada early in 1942 was producing at one-fifth the rate of 
the United States. Money: 54 percent of everyone’s income. 


Canada and the United States 

In other parts of the world the children have 
grown up with the certain knowledge that many 
of their neighbors are not their friends, that war 
will inevitably come to them as it has to their 
fathers for generations. We, who have never 
known the agony of instinctively distrusting our 
fellow men, do not realize how lucky we are in 
having such agreeable neighbors. The Canadian- 
American relationship is unique in the world. 
Two countries of such similarity in size and natural 
resources might well have become deadly rivals. 
Instead we have the inspiring spectacle of 4,000 
miles of unfortified frontier. 

The war emergency has brought the two coun¬ 
tries into increasingly close cooperation. The first 
step was the permanent Joint Defense Board, 
projected by Prime Minister King and President 
Roosevelt at Ogdensburg, New York, in the sum¬ 
mer of 1940. The second important step was the 
Hyde Park Declaration of 1941 which was designed 


to gear the economic war effort of both countries 
This agreement paved the way for the Joint Com¬ 
mittees on Materials, Economics, and War Pro¬ 
duction which have subsequently been established. 

The Country 

There is a story that some Spanish explorers who 
were searching for gold in Canada finally cried in 
disgust “Aca Nada”—“There is nothing here.” 
These men didn’t stay long enough. Canada is 
now the third gold-producing country in the world. 
Her natural resources are rich although only partly 
developed. She has a virtual world monopoly of 
asbestos and nickel. Most of the fur coats worn 
by American women originate in the Canadian 
forests. So does most of the wood pulp for our 
newspapers. 

Canada has our same geographic regions and the 
patterns of existence in each region are very similar 
to ours. Life in the Maritime Provinces is much 
like life in New England. Quebec and New York 
State have dairy industries. Canada’s manufac- 


5 


taring is centered in Ontario and western Quebec, 
just north of our middle-western industrial centers. 
The wheat farmers of Manitoba and Saskatchewan 
have the same droughts and dust storms, the same 
problems of surplus production as our wheat 
farmers of Minnesota and the Dakotas. Calgary, 
in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies, has the 
biggest rodeo (they call it a “stampede”) in the 
world. British Columbia has a logging industry 
which rivals our Northwest. We even have the 
same minorities settled in the same areas: Germans 
in the wheat country, Japanese in the truck¬ 
gardening districts of the West Coast. 

The two countries differ in the distribution of 
their population. Whereas the United States is 
now fairly well settled throughout, the fringe of 
civilization in Canada runs in a 300-mile band 
along the United States border. The northern 
stretches are largely untouched frontier land, vast 
stillnesses broken only by the occasional hunter or 
trapper; more recently by the noise of mine opera¬ 
tions in the newly developed radium area. Cana¬ 
dian summers are shorter, the winters longer and 
colder than ours. Children still go to school in 
40-below-zero weather. Sleighs and dog sleds are 
common winter conveyances. 

The People 

Canadians show the traces of both their English 
heritage and American environment. Canada 
grew up within the framework of the British Em¬ 
pire. English traditions are her traditions. Politi¬ 
cally, Canada has remained tied to the mother 
country. 



6 


But the Canadian way of life is really the Ameri¬ 
can way of life. Canada has the world’s highest 
standard of living next to ours. They too are 
gadget users. There is an automobile and a tele¬ 
phone for every nine people. Sixty-six percent of 
their homes have electricity. They listen to our 
jazz, use our slang, eat the same food. They are 
baseball fans although hockey is their national 
sport. They like to sit on the front porch and 
gossip the way we do. They join the same sort of 
organizations. Their political beliefs parallel ours 
very closely. 

Canadians combine British caution with Yankee 
shrewdness. There is less divorce in Canada. 
There is more convention. Religion plays a 
stronger part in their life than it does here. Cana¬ 
dian Sundays are quieter. Canadians share the 
American spirit of enterprise. With less than one 
percent of the population, Canada has made her¬ 
self the fifth trading nation in the world. 

French Canada 

Canada is the only country in the Western 
Hemisphere that has two official languages and 
two distinct cultures. Her earliest settlers were 
Frenchmen. When England finally acquired title 
to the country in 1763, the French residents were 
numerous enough to maintain their own racial in¬ 
tegrity. Now they comprise one-third of the popu¬ 
lation. They live mostly in Quebec Province, 
They do not look to France as their mother coun¬ 
try although Montreal is the second largest French 
city in the world. First and foremost they are 
Canadians. French Canada is Catholic. 

The War Effort 

Canada’s war effort has been studded with 
achievement records. One of her most spectacular 
contributions is the British Commonwealth Air. 
Training Plan. Working with very limited facili¬ 
ties, Canada now has the best pilot factory in the 
world, capable of turning out more than 30,000 
graduates a year. By the end of 1940, airdromes 
for 65 schools were completed, one more than had 
been originally planned for the spring of 1942. A 
thousand miles of runways h^ve been built, 2,000 
buildings. 

Service blue appears on the streets of every town 
from Halifax to Vancouver. A steady drone of 
training planes fills the air all day and all night. 
Seven men out of ten in the Air Force have been 



Canadians, the rest from Great Britain, Australia, 
New Zealand, and many of the occupied coun¬ 
tries. Canada has footed most of the bill, and 
it is a large.one (estimated at $2,000,000,000). It 
costs $21,000 to train a pilot, $22,000 for an ob¬ 
server, $8,750 for a wireless air gunner. The 
course averages 180 hours flying time to be com¬ 
pleted in 24 weeks. Even then the men are only 
semitrained and must be gradually worked into 
combat units abroad. 

Two Canadian army corps are now serving 
abroad. The Royal Canadian Air Force has 
flown with the R. A. F. from London to Java. 
A thousand Canadians took part in the Cologne, 
raid. Canada’s Navy has jumped from a pre-war 
total of 15 ships to more than 400, her naval man¬ 
power from 1,800 to over 34,000. Canadians, tradi¬ 
tionally landlubbers, except the men of the Maritime 
Provinces, are now proving themselves tough, able 
seamen. Canadian corvettes and destroyers are 
taking an important part in Atlantic convoy duty. 

CHI 

Chinese and Americans 

Because the Chinese live on the other side of the 
globe; because they wear white instead of black for 
mourning; because their books begin on what would 
be the last page of ours; because their family names 
come first, instead of their given names—as if 
they said “Smith John” instead of “John Smith”— 
they used to be regarded as people who stood on 
their heads. Lately we have learned that in many 
essential ways Americans are like the Chinese and 
they are like Americans. 

The Chinese live in a temperate country the size 
of our own. Among themselves they differ as 
much as a Wyoming rancher differs from a Yankee 
mechanic or a Mississippi plantation owner, but 
fundamentally their culture is as unified £s our own; 
they speak many dialects, but their written lan¬ 
guage is the same everywhere. 

Practical, ingenious, and resourceful, they are 
the best businessmen in the East. Like Americans, 
they are fundamentally democratic, and they con¬ 
ceive democracy not as an equality of wealth but 
as an equal opportunity to rise. They keep then- 
ties with the land, even when living in cities. 


On the home front Canada faced the issue 
squarely and put herself rapidly on a complete war 
footing. The government has complete control 
over the domestic economy. In December 1941, 
a price ceiling was placed over all costs including 
wages, rents, public utilities, and services. Designs 
on all consumer goods are frozen to conserve ma¬ 
chine tools. Heavy industry is completely con¬ 
verted to war production. Building is strictly 
limited to war necessities. Gasoline has recendy 
been severely rationed. The famous Mounties 
(who are now completely mechanized—gone are 
the days of the hard-riding, two-gun heroes of child¬ 
hood) have seen to it that no sabotage has hindered 
the production efforts. 

Canada’s exports to England have doubled in 
the past two years. From nothing at all Canada 
his built a munitions industry which turns out all 
forms of modern weapons. Canada’s women are 
filling 20 percent of the 800,000 munitions jobs 
Canada is really rolling. 

NA 



Just as American political and business leaders used 
to boast of having been born in log cabins, Chinese 
generals and statesmen have the tradition of the 
grass hut. 

The story of American relations with China goes 
back to 1784, the year after the Revolution ended, 
when the first Yankee merchantman anchored in 
Canton harbor. It was an American soldier of 


7 


fortune, Frederick Townsend Ward, who first 
taught Chinese soldiers to fight in the Western 
fashion. A shrine near Shanghai still honors this 
“wonderful hero from beyond the seas who 
sprinkled China with his azure blood.” 

In this war the two generals most feared by the 
Japanese have been an American and a Chinese— 
Douglas MacArthur and Chiang Kai-shek. 

The Land and the People 

China proper has an area of 2,903,000 square 
miles. Outer China—Manchuria, Mongolia, and 
Tibet—has an area of 1,577,000 square miles. 
The total is nearly 4){ million square miles—more 
than a quarter of all Asia. 

In China proper there were 422,700,000 people 
in 1936, according to an estimate made by the 
Ministry of the Interior. Outer China had 
35,100,000 people. The total 457,800,000 was 
more than a fifth of the human race. 

The War 

“We are fighting on the same side as the brave 
people of China,” President Roosevelt said in his 
January 6 address, “who for four and a half long 
years have withstood bombs and starvation and 
have whipped the invaders time and again in 
spite of superior Japanese equipment and arms.” 

China has -2 million or more front-line troops, 
reserves of 2 to 4 million, and at least a million 
irregulars and guerrilla fighters. The front-line 
troops, chiefly consisting of infantry, hold a shifting 
front of perhaps 3,000 miles. Besides its ground 
troops, China in the beginning had a small but 
effective air force. The Chinese were ably assisted 
by the famous American Volunteer Group. 

In the course of 30 years’ struggle to free and 
unify his nation, Chiang Kai-shek has come to be 
the symbol of China’s unity and her will to survive. 
When the fortunes of his country were at their 
lowest ebb, he said to his councilors: “Let the 
Japanese come, let them drive us back into Tibet. 
In 5 years we will be back here and will wrest all 
China from the enemy again.” 

Free China includes: All Western China. All the 
South except for a few coastal cities. Central 
China, north of the Yangtze Valley. Its total 
population is between 200 and 250 million people. 

Occupied China includes: The coastal plain. Most 


of the river valleys. Most of the big eastern cities. 
The principal railroads and land adjacent to them. 
It is said that occupied China is like a coat, of 
which the Japanese hold only the buttons and the 
seams. Even in the northeast, Chinese guerrillas 
control the back country away from the railroads. 

Outside of Manchuria, not more than 40 or 50 
million Chinese are actually living under Japanese 
rule. 

The Oldest Nation 

China has an uninterrupted history of more than 
4,000 years, a record no other country in the world 
can match. 

The Chinese invented or discovered silk, por¬ 
celain, tea, printing, gunpowder. 

Long before Europeans, the Chinese had great 
cities, good roads, a canal that is still the longest 
in the world. 

They mined coal; they issued paper money; they 
had a public relief system and a civil service. 

China is famous for: Her philosophers: Confucius, 
Mencius, Lao-tse. Her poets: Li Tai-po and 
Tu Fu. Her landscape painting, her architecture, 
her gardens, her porcelains, her silk brocades. 
Her cooking; the good humor and courtesy of her 
people; all the arts of gracious living. 

Two heroes: In China, the great heroes of the 
past were not warriors but sages, statesmen, poets. 
The two heroes most widely revered today are 
Confucius, the great moral philosopher, who died 
over 50 years before Plato was born, and Sun 
Yat-sen, the founder and lawgiver of the Chinese 
Republic. 

The Winning of the West 

When the Japanese invaded the rich coastal 
provinces, 40 million Chinese trudged a thousand 
miles westward over the mountains. It was as if, 
to escape bondage, the entire population of France 
had moved to the Balkans. An island empire, rich 
in natural resources, was opened to development. 
For the refugees, besides their native skills, carried 
with them 353 factories—150,000 tons of machin¬ 
ery—on trucks and carts, on the backs of horses, 
on the backs of men. They carried their banks, 
their publishing houses, and their schools. Before 
the war, China had 108 colleges, almost all in 
what is now occupied territory. These had 32,000 


8 




students. Today, in the free West, she has 73 
colleges, with 40,000 students. 

What Confucius Said: 

It is useless to discuss accomplished facts—to pro¬ 
test against things past remedy—to find fault with 
bygone things. 

When you see a good man, think of emulating 


COSTA 



U NITED STATES ARMY officers stationed in 
the Canal Zone know Costa Rica well. Be¬ 
fore the war many A of them had learned to escape 
to the little Republic just north of Panama for a 
few days in the cool air of its volcano-ringed 
highlands. 

But here in North America you don’t hear much 
about Costa Rica. It is a quiet, God-fearing neigh¬ 
bor. It doesn’t get its name in the papers. It is 
a nation of small farmers who take pride in its 
stability and progress. And it is one of the purest 
democracies on earth. 

The Name 

It was Columbus who christened it “Rich 
Coast” when, on his last voyage to the New 
World, he landed at what is now Puerto Limon 
and saw the Indians decked out with gold discs. 
He thought that they must have rich stores of metal 
and that the river sands must be thick with gold. 


him; when you see a bad man, examine your heart. 

The serious fault is to have faults and not try to 
mend them. 

To take an untrained multitude into battle is 
equivalent to throwing them away. 

A great army may be robbed of its leader, but 
nothing can rob a poor man of his will. 

What you do not want done to yourself, do not 
do to others. 

RICA 

But the gold seekers who followed Columbus were 
disappointed; Costa Rica had little readily access¬ 
ible gold. The gold seekers went elsewhere, and 
only the farmers stayed. Costa Rica has mines, 
but its real riches are in coffee—and in the bananas 
planted nearly four centuries after Columbus by a 
tough jungle-busting New Yorker named Minor C. 
Keith, who also built Central America’s first rail¬ 
road between Puerto Limon and the Costa Rican 
capital. 

The Country 

Mr. Keith’s railroad, which took 19 years to 
build and cost the lives of 4,000 men, starts out 
among the palm trees and banana and cacao 
plantations of the hot, wet Caribbean coast. It 
makes its way through a dense tropical jungle, hung 
with moss, vines, orchids, shimmering with birds 
and butterflies, treacherous with swamps. Then it 
climbs, suddenly and precipitously,. 5,000 feet up 
through cedars, past mountain torrents, across 
dizzying gulches, to the cool central plain. 

Costa Rica is about the size of West Virginia— 
23,000 square miles—with only a little over a third 
of West Virginia’s population. This small terri¬ 
tory is divided into three separate areas by bound¬ 
aries of altitude. In the sultfy Caribbean lowland, 
where it may rain 300 days a year, live mainly 
United Fruit Company managers and the West 
Indian Negroes who work on the banana planta¬ 
tions. The Pacific plain is a cattle country. The 
real Costa Rica is the lovely meseta —the central 
tableland at an altitude of 3,000 to 4,000 feet, 
with higher mountains towering over it. It is a 
country of tall green grasses, fresh winds, and per¬ 
petual spring. Here live three-quarters of the 
population. Here are the four largest towns, 
within a few miles of each other: San Jos6, the 


9 



r 

capital; Cartago, the old Spanish colonial capital, 
clinging to the foot of a volcano; Alajuela and 
Heredia, set down in the midst of sugar-cane fields 
and coffee orchards. Here are hundreds of small 
proprietary farms, from 10 to 100 acres each: 80 
percent of Costa Rica’s cultivated land is owned in 
such small holdings. Here grows Costa Rica’s 
famous coffee—which all used to go to the London 
market—its white-flowered, red-berried trees cling¬ 
ing to mountainsides so steep you would think the 
orchardists would have to use ladders to tend 
them. The farms are neat and well-cared for; 
their low adobe houses have painted windows, 
filled with masses of bright flowers; their porches 
are heaped with drying ears of corn, beans, onions. 
The cities are small, low-lying, unpretentious. 
Even in San Jose, for all the impressive public 
buildings and the elaborate, sophisticated National 
Theatre, and the formal parks, the wide streets 
lead straight away into hills and fields. 

For Costa Rica is still a pioneer country, like the 
United States Northwest. Although two-thirds of 
its land is suitable for cultivation, only about one- 
sixth of it is now cultivated. Much of the rest is 
still virgin forest—cedar, mahogany, cypress, 
guayacan. Each year the forest is pushed back a 
litde farther; each year there are more miles of 
new roads. But outside of the few cities, away from 
the few railroads and the air lines, Costa Rican life 
has all the simplicity of the frontier. A gaily 
painted two-wheeled oxcart is still part of the Costa 
Rican farmer’s standard equipment. He travels 
from village to village in it—unless he travels on 
horseback; in it he carts his harvested coffee berries 
from his own “orchard” to the neighboring bene- 
ficio or plant for treatment and shipment abroad; 
it may even be seen, pulled by a pair of leisurely 
oxen, in the streets of the capital. 

The People 

There are some 639,000 Costa Ricans. Only 
about 3,500 of them are Indians; the rest, except 
for the West Indian Negroes in the coastal banana 
plantations, are white. Their ancestors were hardy, 
energetic peasants from Galicia and the Basque 
Provinces of rocky northwestern Sp^inwho set a 
pattern of hard work on small farms. The men 
are solid, sober citizens of dignity and pure Spanish 
speech; their graceful women still wear, in the coun¬ 
try, long braids, flounced printed cotton skirts, 
and embroidered shawls, the heritage of Spain. 


For gayety, the provincial towns have concerts in 
their shaded parks, and they still have bullfights: 
neither the bull nor the torero is ever hurt and any¬ 
one may try his hand. But the national sport is soc¬ 
cer, which the young men play in the park in the 
late afternoons. 

The Costa Ricans have set up under these 
tropical skies, in the shadow of these Central 
American volcanoes, a way of life as sober and 
deliberate as that of a New England village, and as 
free in its expression of opinion. It is not a way of 
life they would willingly part with. In the 1850’s 
under President Juan Rafael Mora, they fought to 
keep foreign control and slavery out of Central 
America. They would do it again. They have 
one of the freest presses left in this world, and one 
of the most enlightened school systems. Twenty 
percent of the national budget goes into the schools: 
the schools are free and every child must attend. 
Costa Rica’s greatest hero is no man-on-horseback, 
but President Jesus Jimenez Zamora, who back in 
the 1860’s laid the foundations of the school sys¬ 
tem, including public institutions for girls at a time 
when many more advanced and wealthier nations 
had never dreamed of such a thing. 

Every Costa Rican citizen is required by law to 
vote in the presidential elections held every 4 years 
and in the elections to the one-chamber legislature. 
The President is responsible to the Congress which 
may and often does override his authority. The 
President lives like an ordinary citizen, he walks 
about the streets unguarded; his house is open to 
any citizen of the Republic. 

. . . and the War 

This is the country which was one of the first of 
the American nations after Pearl Harbor to declare 
war on the Axis. Months before December 7, the 
Costa Rican Congress passed a law providing for 
deportation of any person circulating Nazi opin¬ 
ions, and the law has been applied more than once. 
Since the War, Costa Rica has firmly put her 
German citizens of Nazi sympathies into concen¬ 
tration camps. 

Costa Rica has a standing army of only 500; she 
has always been proud of having many more 
teachers than soldiers. But she has large reserves 
(150,000) in proportion to her population. She 
has a highly strategic position, as the nearest Cen¬ 
tral American nation to Panama, and her people 
realize it. President Calderon Guardia warned 


10 



them recently that the country might “become a 
field of operations for powers trying to commit 
aggression against the Panama Canal.” Costa 
Rica owns a strategic island—the Isla de Cocos— 
southwest of her own coast in the Pacific. 

Meanwhile, besides her coffee and her bananas, 
and the cacao from which are made some 10,000,000 

CU 

“Cuba, almost in sight of our shores, from a 
multitude of considerations has become an 
object of transcendent importance to . . . our 
Union. Its commanding position with refer¬ 
ence to the Gulf of Mexico and the West India 
seas ... its safe and capacious harbor of the 
Havana . . . the nature of its productions 
and of its wants . . . give it an importance in 
the sum of our national interests, with which 
that of no other foreign territory can be com¬ 
pared ...” 

—John Quincy Adams, in 1823. 

Cuba and the World Conflict 

Today Cuba, just 720 miles from the vital 
Panama Canal, is a key to the continental defense 
of the United States. The Windward Passage, 
nearest entrance through the Antilles to the Canal 
and chief route for traffic between the United 
States and the Canal Zone, lies between the eastern 
tip of Cuba and Haiti. The American naval base 
at Guantanamo, southeastern extremity of Cuba, 
was rented by treaty in 1903. Guantanamo 
guards the strategic strait. The Cuban army and 
navy, while small, stand ready to supplement 
American defenses. In 1940 Cuba had two escort 
vessels, five gunboats, an armed transport, and a 
dozen coast-guard vessels of small size. The 20,000 
men of the army, navy and police can be aug¬ 
mented by 30,000 reservists. 

Cuba’s Political Stand 

On December 9, 1941, Cuba declared war on 
Japan, and 2 days later on Germany and Italy. 
The Axis tried to use Cuba as a base for its propa¬ 
ganda mill, with Spanish Falangists and Nazi 
agents cooperating there. Two months before 
President Roosevelt declared a state of national 


pounds a year of fine chocolates for the United 
States* sweet tooth—besides these staples of her 
economy, and sugar, and hardwoods like mahog¬ 
any—Costa Rica has rubber which grows wild in 
her jungles. The Goodyear Company has a Costa 
Rican plantation which is beginning to produce 
excellent commercial rubber. 


BA 



emergency in the United States, President Batista 
barred all totalitarian propaganda in Cuba and 
outlawed organizations affiliated with Axis powers, 
their flags, uniforms, and insignia. 

Sugar and the War 

Cuba’s sugar has been a vital factor in furthering 
the war effort of the United Nations. Cuba has 
sold practically her entire 1942 sugar output of 
4,100,000 long tons to the United States Defense 
Supplies Corporation. This sugar is not only for 
our own use, but for that of Great Britain and 
Russia too. 

Cuba and Cubans 

This island, with its fertile soil placed in the cen¬ 
ter of the most favored maritime routes, is 44,000 
square miles—about the size of the State of Penn¬ 
sylvania. Its population of 4,228,000 is 68 percent 
native white. 

Spanish is the official language, but English is 
widely understood. 


471692 * 


11 


Cuba’s Fight for Freedom 

Long before the Spanish-American War gave 
Cuba its independence, the cause of Cuban freedom 
was popular in this country. Narcisco L6pez, un¬ 
successful leader of a conspiracy against Spain in 
1847, fled to the United States. The New York 
Sun offered him the use of its flagpole, and there, 
for the first time, the flag of the Cuban Republic 
was flown. When Narcisco Lopez sailed for Cuba 
on another unsuccessful expedition, he was accom¬ 
panied by 400 Americans. 

While no Cubans rose to the assistance of Lopez, 
a bookish young aristocrat, Carlos Manuel de 
Cespedes, cherished the memory of Lopez’s exploit 
and in 1868 he and 146 patriots made Cuba’s first 
real bid for freedom at the town of Yara. The 
Grit o' de Tara symbolizes the beginning of active 
revolt against Spain, and even though the Ten 
Years’ War ended unsuccessfully, de Cespedes is 
known to Cubans as the Father'of His Country. 

In 1895, Jose Marti, an intellectual exiled from 
Cuba by the despotic authorities, raised money in 
America for the final insurrection. Marti had, as 
a boy, dedicated himself to the cause of liberty, 
saying: “To many generations of slaves must suc¬ 
ceed one generation of martyrs.” 

In February of 1895, in the village of Baire, the 
second battle for freedom was launched, led by 
Maximo Gomez and the mulatto, Antonio Maceo. 
Marti joined forces with them and lost his life. 
Many of the insurgents were Negroes—and as a 
result the Negro race has secured political standing 
in Cuba unmatched in any other country where 
whites are dominant. 

With their sugar-cane knives (called “machetes”), 
with torches that fired the cane fields, and with 
dynamite that blew up bridges and railways, the 
patriots made Cuba an economic loss to Spain. 
When the U. S. S. Maine , on a courtesy call in 
Havana Harbor, was blown up in 1898, it was the 
incident that touched off the Spanish-American 
War. 

Peace and the Platt Amendment 

At the peace conference which followed the vic¬ 
tory of the United States no Cuban delegates were 
present. A three-year period of American occu¬ 
pation followed. It was during this time that 
United States army doctors, working on a theory 
propounded by the Cuban, Dr. Carlos Finlay, 
proved that the female stegomyia mosquito was 


the cause of yellow fever, and cleared all Cuba of 
this dread disease. 

In 1901 Cuba’s constitution was signed. The 
United States required the addition of the Platt 
Amendment, however, which reserved for itself 
the right to prohibit certain foreign treaties, and 
to protect life, property, and individual liberty— 
should the Cuban Government fail to do so. The 
Platt Amendment was abrogated in May 1934, as 
part of President Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor 
Policy. 

Economic Ties 

Economically, Cuba is closely bound to this 
country. American citizens have invested many 
millions of dollars in Cuba. About 55 percent of 
Cuba’s sugar mills are owned by Americans and 
mostly operated by them. In 1939, 75 percent of 
Cuba’s exports went to the United States and 73 
percent of her imports came from here. Cuba, 
second largest producer of sugar in the world, also 
exports tropical fruit, tobacco, and coffee. 

Cuba’s second major economic asset has been her 
tourist trade. Sugar and the tourist trade both 
fluctuate noticeably as conditions in America 
change. Raised tariffs and the economic collapse 
of 1929, which brought depression to America, 
almost ruined Cuba economically. With high 
tariffs in 1933 Cuba was able to sell only 1,600,000 
tons of sugar, as compared with 3,384,000 in 1924. 
The reciprocal trade treaties of 1934 and the stable 
government of President Batista, however, have 
meant revived prosperity. 

The Tighter Side of Cuba 

In this sun-ripened land, the palm-thatched huts, 
the tall royal palms, and the brilliant fireflies are 
part of a memorable countryside. But American 
tourists have flocked particularly to the city of 
Havana, with her gold-domed Capitol, wide 
Prado, and Malecon; her old Castilian section, and 
Morro Castle, where Spain’s prisoners languished. 

Play Is Not All 

The understanding between Cuba and the United 
States goes deeper than shared holidays. Dr. 
Nicolas Rivero, of the Cuban Embassy in Wash¬ 
ington, cited, in a recent speech, the friendly 
cooperation of the two countries in war, as in 
peace, and pledged continued gratitude “for the 
generosity and high idealism of the people of the 
United States in the struggle and attainment of 
Cuban independence.” 


12 



CZECHOSLOVAKIA 

The silver thread running through all Czechoslovakian history is the ideal of 
humanitarianism.—Palacky, foremost Czech historian. 


The Birth of the Republic 

In October of 1918, in Washington, D. C., 
Thomas Masaryk proclaimed the independence of 
Czechoslovakia. A simultaneous declaration was 
issued from Paris. The proclamation of inde¬ 
pendence and the Czechoslovakian constitution 
both acknowledged American inspiration. The 
new republic had its roots in the thousand-year-old 
Bohemian state, one of whose early rulers was 
Good King Wenceslaus. The battle of White 
Mountain in 1620 marked the beginning of 
Austria’s three-century domination of Bohemia. 

Its People 

More than two-thirds of the people were Czechs 
and Slovaks. So closely are the two groups allied, 
in background and tradition, that in official 
statistics they were classed together, as Czecho¬ 
slovaks. They lived in a country which bore their 
name, but which had been so long a crossroads of 
Europe that it held many minorities: Rutbenians 
and Poles, Germans and Hungarians, small groups 
overflowing from each of the neighboring nations. 

The Country 

Roughly 15 million people (twice as many as in 
all our New England states together) occupied an 
area of 54,000 square miles—approximately the 
size of Great Britain and Ireland. In Europe, 
Czechoslovakia ranked ninth in population, thir¬ 
teenth in area, third in industrial capacity. 

Twenty Years oj Democracy 

Before Munich, Czechoslovakia was free, pros¬ 
perous, tolerant, educated. She usually main¬ 
tained a favorable balance of trade; matched heavy 
industries with agriculture; produced more steel 
and iron in 1929 than Italy; possessed the famous 
Skoda, third largest munitions plant in Europe. 

The Land Reform, around 1919, removed the 
vestiges of feudalism left from Hapsburg tyranny. 
There was no room for aristocracy in a republic of 
many peasant landholders, cooperatives, and a 


flourishing middle class. Czechoslovakia’s two 
greatest men, Thomas Masaryk, first President, and 
Eduard Benes, second President, were teachers and 
philosophers, both born of humble parents. 

Trade unions were powerful, and cooperated with 
welfare organizations to aid the unemployed, im¬ 
poverished, and sick. 

Czechoslovakia was proud of its many schools, 
its almost 600-year-old University of Prague, its 
free intellectual life. The people were proud too of 
their thoroughly representational Parliament, and 
its policy of local self-government, fair to minority 
and state groups alike. 

The Nazis Take Over 

In the “setdement” at Munich in September 
1938, Czechoslovakia was forced to grant to Hitler 
the Sudetenland, on her western borders, which 
contained all her great defensive fortifications. 
From that time on, it was easy for the Nazis. On 
March 14, 1939, they inspired a Slovakian seces¬ 
sion; on March 15 they marched into Prague, the 
Czechoslovak capital; on March 16 they pro¬ 
claimed the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Mo¬ 
ravia,” thus taking direct control of the richest, 
most populous part of the country, while manipu¬ 
lating “Slovakia” through their puppets. 



13 



Security of Life and Limb 

The “Protectorate” is policed fey a force of 
300,000 Nazi soldiers and Storm Troopers. By 
March of 1941, 4,000 Czechs had been murdered or 
tortured to death in Prague alone. Over 80,000 
Czechs are in concentration camps and jails. The 
daily routine of persecuting Catholics, Protestants, 
and Jews cannot be broken by appeal to Nazi- 
dominated Czech courts. All cases involving Ger¬ 
mans are tried in “people’s courts” in Germany. 
From September 1941, the Reich “Protector” was 
Reinhard Heydrich, second only to Himmler in 
the Gestapo and known as “Henker” (Hangman). 
In June 1942, Heydrich was killed by a few 
Czech patriots. Within 2 weeks after the shooting, 
over 500 innocent Czechs had been executed in 
reprisal. Because the village of Lidice was sup¬ 
posed to have sheltered Heydrich’s assassins, its 
entire male population was shot, its women sent 
to concentration camps and its children to “edu¬ 
cational centers”; and—in the words of the official 
Berlin statement—“the township was leveled to 
the ground and the name of the community 
extinguished.” 

Workers and Owners 

Over 400,000 Czechs and Slovaks have been 
drafted for enforced labor in Germany. Trade 
unions, existing in name only, are lackeys of Dr. 
Ley’s Nazi Labor Front. The policy called “Ger- 
manization” is large-scale plunder. It means: 
destruction of domestic industries unless run by or 
for the Nazis; dispossession of Czechs from their 
farms and belongings, factories and banks; replace¬ 
ment of Czechs by Nazis, who pocket the profits 
and run the country for the greater good of Hitler. 
Hunger and slavery are Hitler’s gifts to the 
Protectorate. 

Education and Censorship 

Universities are closed, grade schools taught with 
Nazi texts, the Sokols (patriotic physical-culture 
societies founded 80 years ago) suppressed, news¬ 
papers made captive. Even Czech sermons and 
hymn books are censored, forbidden to call upon 
God to “protect our people.” 

The Fight 

The temporary capital of the free Czechoslovak 
Government is London. Here Dr. Bene*’ Cabinet 


and the State Council plan resistance, look ahead 
to a future free Czechoslovakia, and a Czecho- 
slovak-Polish confederation, supported by a friendly 
Russia. 

Czechs who escaped from the Protectorate fought 
in France, in Poland, at Tobruk. Now, Czech 
soldiers, rescued by ship from southern France, are 
organized in a separate motorized brigade in Eng¬ 
land. A similar brigade is being organized in 
Russia. There are more than a thousand Czech 
airmen in England, an active unit of the R. A. F. 
credited with a record of 400 enemy planes 
destroyed. 

Inside Czechoslovakia, the fight must be under¬ 
ground. Their slogan is “Slow Down”; its symbol, 
the turtle. They know that if each man in a 
factory slows down but 10 minutes daily, the lag 
in production will hurt Germany more than the 
loss of a regiment. In the fall of ’41 the Germans 
found armament production had slowed down as 
much as one-third. 

Sabotage is ingenious and persistent. Chemicals, 
added to molten steel, make faulty cannon which 
explode mysteriously when they are used in the 
field. Bombs, filled with sand, have dropped as 
duds over England. Even the blackout is service¬ 
able—under its darkness Czechs remove driving 
belts and essential machinery parts, crippling pro¬ 
duction for days. 

"Independent” Slovakia 

Slovakia, which separated itself from the Re¬ 
public, now finds itself a Slavic people who must 
fight against other Slavs. Hider points to Slovakia 
as his “Showcase State.” But deaths of many 
Slovak soldiers fighting for the Nazis on the Russian 
front make the people complain they are paying an 
even higher price in human life to the German 
aggressor than the Czechs in the “Protectorate.” 
Recendy there have been reliable reports of the 
withdrawal of Slovak units from the front lines— 
because disillusioned Slovaks were going over, in 
mass, to join the Russians. 

Today 

The honor roll of the dead, murdered by the 
Nazis, includes generals, priests, students, writers* 
teachers, mayors of cities, workers, peasants, land¬ 
lords, bankers. All classes have been fused in the 
white heat of terror, and one solid united Czecho¬ 
slovak nation prepares the day of its deliverance. 



DOMINICAN REPUBLIC 

Area. —19,325 square miles—twice the size of the State of Vermont. 
Population. —1,656,000. Language. —Spanish. Capital. —Ciudad Trujillo. 


T HE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC was the first 
land in the New World to open its borders to 
the refugees of war-torn Europe. In 1940 a colony 
was established on the shores of Sosua Bay. Today, 
with 450 Europeans in residence, it is a functioning 
farm settlement. 

The Dominican Republic occupies two-thirds of 
the island of Hispaniola which lies 48 miles south¬ 
east of Cuba and 64 miles west of Puerto Rico. 
Haiti occupies the other third of the island. 
Hispaniola is ribbed by high narrow mountain 
ranges and creased by deep valleys and sudden 
lowlands; an admiral, asked to describe the country 
by the King of Spain, is said to have crumpled up 
a piece of paper with the remark: “There, Your 
Majesty, is Hispaniola.” 

The history of the Dominican Republic, also 
called Santo Domingo, goes back beyond our own. 
beginnings. Columbus landed there on his first 
voyage. There was the first European settlement 
in the Western Hemisphere, there the first uni¬ 
versity founded in 1538 and the first cathedral in 
1512. The City of Santo Domingo—now renamed 
Ciudad Trujillo—was built by Columbus’ brother, 
Bartolome, and named for their father’s patron 
saint. The ruins of the palace of Diego, Spanish 
Governor and son of Columbus, still stand. 

At first the Dominican Republic was the center 
of the entire enterprise of colonization on the 
continent. Exploratory voyages led to the dis¬ 
covery, conquest, and colonization of Mexico, 
Peru, Panama (then called Istmo de Darien), 
Cuba, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Florida. After 
the bustle of settlement and exploration died down, 
the original Indian population was found to have 
been practically wiped out by epidemics and 
forced labor. Lands once cultivated were given 
over to cattle-grazing. 

Sumner Welles, Under Secretary of State, once 
said: “There has been no republic on the American 
continent whose inhabitants have fought more 
nobly or against greater odds to maintain their 
freedom than the Dominicans.” This fight for 
self-determination began in 1821, but it was not 


until 1844 that independence of the Republic 
was achieved under the leadership of Juan Pablo 
Duarte. 

The driving force in Santo Domingo today is 
Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, soldier President. 
Generalissimo Trujillo has been a firm friend of the 
United States, and Santo Domingo was one of the 
first of the Latin American countries to follow our 
lead in declaring war on the Axis. An army of 
300 officers and 3,000 men, provided for peacetime, 
has been increased for the war period, and guards 
the coastlines. The Republic’s airfields have been 
opened to American military planes. Several of 
these airfields are excellent and the transports of 
Pan American Airways have made regular stops 
there for several years. 

Sugar is now the principal export, representing 
three-fifths of the productive wealth. The eco¬ 


nomic danger of too great dependence on one crop 
has resulted in the establishment of government 
agricultural stations in each of the provinces. 
These teach the latest fanning methods and foster 
the growing of rice, com, bananas, mangoes, 
guavas, coffee, and tobacco. The breaking up of 



15 








large estates into small parcels for the individual 
farmer has increased the internal prosperity of 
the country. 

The Dominican Republic has encouraged the 
investment of foreign capital and the extensive 
building of bridges and roads. Generalissimo 
Trujillo’s most opulent contribution to progress 
was the rebuilding of the capital after almost 
complete destruction by hurricane in 1930. It 
then became Ciudad Trujillo. Since that time the 


harbor has been dredged, opening the port to 
large ocean-going boats, and a large tourist hotel 
has almost been completed. 

Arturo Despradel, Secretary of State for Foreign 
Relations and delegate to the Havana Conference, 
made the attitude of the Dominican people plain 
when he said: “Our lands, water, air, and men are 
at the disposal of the governments of this conti¬ 
nent to defend the ideals of justice and political 
independence of the American nations.” 


GREECE 

“CAIRO, EGYPT, March 16, 1942—By Associated Press.—Starvation, expo¬ 
sure, and executions have taken a toll of 150,000 to 200,000 lives in Greece in less 
than a year of German-Italian occupation ... In February ... an intense cold 
wave combined with lack of food and water to boost deaths in the Athens area 
alone to 1,500 daily . . . The ration is 4 ounces of hard, black bread in which 
cornmeal, rice, and chestnut flour are mixed ... A park in the center of Athens’ 
main plaza, Constitution Square, has been converted into a cemetery because 


so many people died in the heart of the 

O NE YEAR before the above dispatch was 
sent, American newspapers printed heroic 
stories of the Greek armies driving back Italian 
invaders across the Albanian frontier. Mussolin 
had attacked Greece without warning on October 
28, 1940, but his offensive backfired. 

A new tyrant struck in the year between that 
triumphant repulse of Fascist armies and the spring 
day in 1942 when a reporter abroad sent his 
account of tragic suffering. Hitler suggested but 



city . . 

the Greeks refused an armistice with the Italian 
whom they had so roundly trounced. 

On April 6, 1941, both Yugoslavia and Greece 
were invaded by Germany. British and Imperial 
forces joined in the Greek fight against tragic odds. 
Outnumbered, outflanked, surrounded, the allies 
fought on to the last. The Greek King and his 
ministers went first to Egypt and later to London, 
to carry on the Government. 

The Greeks with calm fortitude watched their 
allies and government depart. They helped many 
of their own soldiers to escape and they helped 
their ships, manned by Greek sailors, to flee toward 
allied ports. These fighting forces now have been 
reassembled: the Royal Hellenic Air Force is oper¬ 
ating in Libya against Germans and Italians while 
Greek soldiers fight in the Near East, and Greek 
sailors have joined other United Nations fleets. 
When German columns entered Athens on April 
27, the citizens watched in silence. Axis soldiers 
who now police the country feel its people’s scorn 
for them, know that courage, endurance, and love 
of freedom in this land have not been broken by 
starvation and torture. Greek guerrilla bands 
recendy opened a new Balkan front against the 
Axis along the Bulgarian border. They are now 






striking at German and Italian camps and supply 
lines on the mainland and in Crete. 

First European Democracy 

The first European democracy was born in 
Athens. The Greeks of antiquity were responsible 
for Europe’s first philosophies of the soul’s im¬ 
mortality, the recognition of the importance and 
dignity of the individual human life. Greek was 
the tongue of Homer, Plato, Sophocles, Aristo¬ 
phanes, Euripides, and Aeschylus. The glories of 
Greek sculpture and Greek architecture have 
survived 25 centuries. 

Greeks are proud of their history and their 
ancient heroes. To the list of their immortals they 
have added the name of Byron who in an earlier 
day helped Greece’s fight for freedom and died 
there. 

'Greece forms the southern end of the Balkan 
Peninsula and is a land of steep mountains, scanty 
rivers, and—for the most part—poor soil, only 
one-fifth of which is at all arable. The country is 
cut almost in two by the Gulf of Corinth and 
surrounding the mainland are islands large and 
small, the “isles of Greece.” Crete, the southern¬ 
most, was the last batdefield of the German 
invasion. 

Although freedom of worship is guaranteed all, 
the Greek Orthodox Church is the State religion. 


Tobacco and currants are the most important 
crops. Other products such as olives, olive oil, and 
wines are exported in large quantities. As in¬ 
dustry has developed, native manufactures have 
gradually replaced some imports—particularly 
silks, other textiles, and chemicals. The land 
contains a variety of mineral deposits such as 
copper, bauxite, zinc, silver, nickel, and iron 
ore. 

The Greeks are excellent sailors. Their merchant 
navy before the. war contained 549 steamships, 
while the Navy was a defensive force of mostly 
light craft. About 300 merchant ships with a gross 
tonnage of one million which escaped the Axis are 
now chartered to the United Nations with their 
own crews, as transports and cargo vessels in the 
Atlantic and Pacific. To strengthen the Navy, 
which had heavy losses, the British Government 
recently turned over ten warships. These the 
Greeks now operate along with their own remaining 
units in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Indian 
Ocean. 

There was no “peace” party in Greece; when war 
began, bitter opponents of the* government’s in¬ 
ternal policies rallied to the nation’s defense. 
Hitler faced a united people. “They bow to no 
man and are never slaves,” a would-be conqueror 
of the Greeks said twenty-four hundred years ago. 
His words are true today. 


GUATEMALA 


S OMEWHERE in Guatemala a businesslike 
airfield is tended by men whose ancestors 
worshipped in the stone temples of the Mayas. 
Out from the hangars roll trim United States 
planes assigned to the bomber patrol guarding 
Pacific and Caribbean approaches to Panama. 
This airbase is a solid symbol of Guatemala’s 
share in the war against Axis barbarism. 

Ride with the United States Army pilot as his 
plane soars over Guatemala. From volcano to 
jungle, the land unrolls beneath him—45,450 
square miles. Down below, in the towns and 
villages, live the people of this Central American 
republic, 3 million of them—more than in any 
other land in Central America. 

Guatemala is mosdy mountain country. To 
the southwest lie the 28 volcanoes of the Sierra 



17 


Madre, whose lava has streamed through the history 
of this sunswept land. To the north is the plain of 
Pet6n, a lush jungle of brilliant birds, screaming 
monkeys, rare hardwoods, and the sapota tree 
whose trunks runs with chicle for chewing gum. Be¬ 
neath this tangled jungle the ancient ruins of the 
Maya Empire, hardly visible from the air, crumble 
into dust. Fourteen hundred years ago, men lived 
here who plotted the courses of the stars and 
charted a calendar as scientific as our own of 1942. 

Of Guatemala’s 3 million, a large proportion have 
Indian blood, pure or mixed with Spanish. Many 
Indians speak dialects that have come down straight 
from Maya forebears, though Spanish is the official 
language. 

The Indian lives away from the cities. His home 
is a thatched hut in a little village. On his tiny 
farm, he raises beans and corn, comes home to eat 
tortillas—cornmeal pancakes. His wife makes the 
colorful textiles and blankets for which Guatemala 
is famous. Her work is all by hand. Most Indians 
labor on the Jincas, the estates belonging to wealthier 
Guatemalans or to foreigners. “Liberty,” says 
Guatemalan law, “lies in the choice of the class of 
work which one prefers to do.” 

At least once each week, the central plaza of every 
Guatemalan town explodes into vivid color. Mar¬ 
ket day is the high spot of Indian life. Traders 
walk as much as 40 miles from their villages with 
blankets, cloths, pottery, dyestuffs, spices, vegeta¬ 
bles, fruit. Booths go up under the palm leaves and 
in the arcades of the town hall. The sound of voices 
glorying in a hard-driven bargain rises high in the 
warm air—already heavy with the smell of tortillas 
frying, beans simmering, meat stewing with spices 
and sauces, and coffee roasting. Nearby, in the 
church, the devout whisper their prayers. 

But not all of Guatemala is age-old Indian tradi¬ 
tion. Under vigorous President Jorge Ubico, 


4,000 miles of good new highways have been built 
to connect the cities. An American-built railroad 
runs from Puerto Barrios, on the Caribbean, to 
Guatemala-City, the clean-swept capital. In a 
few miles the line climbs 5,000 feet, crossing over 
deep canyons and' mountain torrents, pushing 
through dense green jungle. 

One of Guatemala’s heroes is Justo Rufino Bar¬ 
rios, the Republic’s President from 1873 to 1885, 
who wrote: 

“One of the most precious liberties of man is 
that of adoring God according to the dictates of 
his own conscience, and . . . liberty of conscience, 
in order to be real, carries with it the right to 
worship the Creator according to the belief of each 
individual . . . and this right, won by humanity 
after centuries of fighting, has been recognized and 
sanctioned by all the civilized nations of the world 
. . . Liberty of conscience is inviolable in the 
territory of Guatemala.” 

As a principle, this statement stresses one of the 
great issues of our war against the Axis. 

Guatemala’s army is the largest in Central 
America. Her greatest contributions to the war 
effort of the United Nations are twofold: 

1. Her cooperation with the United States in 
maintaining air bases for American patrol planes. 

2. Her natural resources. 

Guatemala produces a hundred million pounds 
of coffee each year, two-thirds of which goes to the 
United States, making up 70 percent of the coun¬ 
try’s total exports. Guatemala also produces more 
than 8 million stems of bananas each year, nearly 
3 million pounds of chicle for American gum- 
chewers, sugar and coconuts and dyestuffs and 
castor oil for airplane engines. In her jungle 
grows the Castilla elastica , the wild-rubber tree, 
which may some day become a source of rubber 
for w eeled warfare. 


HAITI 


C OLUMBUS called the island Hispaniola— 
“little Spain.” One of his ships, the Santa 
Maria , ran aground there on Christmas Eve in 
1492. Out of its wreckage the crew built a fort, 
the first European structure in the Western Hemi- 
& 

18 


sphere. After Columbus came the shiploads of 
Spaniards in search of easy riches. The native 
Indians, in the course of a few years, vanished as a 
people and Negro slaves were imported from 
Africa. 




Nearly two centuries later the mountainous 
island was taken over by the French. It became 
one of tfie most prosperous colonies in the West 
Indies. Never since then has Haiti been so rich. 
Its products made up one-third of all France’s 
foreign commerce. In return, France gave Haiti 
her language and her culture, which remain 
French to this day. 

But Haiti has long been freed from French 
domination. It was the second nation in this 
hemisphere to become independent, the first to 
abolish slavery. Today, from her capital at Port- 
au-Prince, Haiti rules herself, sharing the West 
Indian island with the Dominican Republic. It 
is a small land of 10,204 square miles with a history 
of courage and audacity. 

The impact of the French Revolution rippled 
southwest across the Atlantic, and beat against 
Haiti’s shores. One Haitian leader emerged to 
rank with the great characters of history. Tous- 
saint L’Ouverture was a former slave who led the 
Haitians in revolt against the French landowners. 
Napoleon sent an expeditionary force. L’Ouver¬ 
ture was trapped, captured, and brought back to 
France to die as a prisoner. Two of his country¬ 
men, Dessalines and Petion, who had once served 
along with Toussaint L’Ouverture as high-ranking 
officers in the French Army itself, carried on the 
fight. On January 1, 1804, Dessalines proclaimed 
the independence of Haiti. Standing by the shore 
of the blue Caribbean, he tore the French tricolor 
in three pieces. The white stripe he tossed into the 
sea, dramatically symbolizing freedom from white 
oppression. The red and the blue he sewed to¬ 
gether, to make Haiti’s flag. Later a coat of arms 
was added. 

During the years that followed, Haiti was a bat¬ 
tleground for ambitious leaders. Dessalines set the 
style by proclaiming himself Emperor. Henri 
Christophe, who called himself King, built the 
famous citadel at Cap-Haitien. 

Nine Haitians in every ten are black, the rest 
mulatto. As in most Latin countries, the principal 
religion is Roman Catholic. The 3,000,000 Hai¬ 
tians, for the most part, live in their villages, work 



the plantations, gather the fruits and vegetables on 
which they live. Their thatch-roofed huts blend 
into a lush landscape of palm trees, bougainvillaea, 
poinsQttias, against a backdrop of mountains reach¬ 
ing high into the sky. They speak French and a 
local Creole. 

Haiti grows coffee, cotton, and cocoa, sisal for 
rope-making, tobacco and bananas and sugar. 
Nearly half its exports go to the United States, in 
return for cotton manufactured goods, foodstuffs, 
machinery and apparatus, mineral oils and soap. 
With funds from the United States, Haiti has built 
roads and is carrying out a program for the large- 
scale production of rubber. Plans provide for 
planting 7,500 acres of rubber trees now, 70,000 
acres later on. This can be good rubber country, 
for soil and tropical climate are right and there 
is a large' supply of manpower. But it will be a 
few years before the new rubber trees can be 
tapped. 

Meantime, Haiti is increasing its production of 
sisal to replace former United Nations imports 
from Malaya and the East Indies. 

When the Axis began all-out war on the United 
States with the attack on Pearl Harbor, Haiti 
promptly declared war. By this act, Haiti takes 
its place among the 28 United Nations pledged to 
fight through to victory for human freedom. 


471692°—42--4 


19 




THE UNITED NATIONS 



From Norway to New Zealand 

























^'Norway. 


&Great 

ritairU' 


r Belgium 

Luxembourg^rfk \ £Poland 
/O'v/ ^.Czechoslovakia 

f/ f\ kX u 9°p^j* 


Union of 
★ Soviet Socialist 
Republics 


★ China 


India 


Philippine' 
X Islands 


South Africa' 


★ 

Australia 


They Stretch Across the World 

Hi/' , « 


























HONDURAS 


H ONDURAS—the third largest of the Central 
American republics—is the greatest banana 
land in the world, exporting more than 12,000,000 
stems a year. The banana industry has its own 
capitals of Progreso and San Pedro Sula; its own 
ports of Puerto Cortes, Tela, and La Ceiba; its own 
tramlines and narrow-gauge railways; its own palm- 
thatched villages raised on stilts above swamps; its 
own schoolhouses and hospitals. 

All this activity is confined to a 75- to 80-mile- 
wide strip along the hot and sticky Caribbean coast. 
Honduras beyond the coastal region is a vast and 
tangled complex of volcanoes, jungles, and forests, 
of mesas and high valleys, deep basins and many 
rivers, of mountain walls rising to 10,000 feet, of 
thick cedar and pine forests dominated by an occa¬ 
sional mahogany tree, its leafy yellow-reddish crown 
jutting into the sky. It is a lush land, a land that 
formerly served as a hiding place for adventurers, 
a land where ancient races such as the Caribs (the 
Indians after whom the Caribbean was named) 
still live deep in the jungle^ 

Honduras has an area of about 44,000 square 
miles, roughly the same as Pennsylvania; its popu¬ 
lation, estimated at a little more than a million, is 
about one-tenth of Pennsylvania’s. With the ex¬ 
ception of the pure Indian tribes of the unexplored 
Mosquitia Territory, the Hondurans are a mestizo 



people, 95 percent of them a mixture of Spanish 
and Indian. They are peaceful and hardworking, 
small farmers in the main. Honduras is a young 
country. Its industries and banks are just begin¬ 
ning to sense the complexities of the modern world. 
A rough and almost impassable terrain has in¬ 
finitely complicated the pressing problem of build¬ 
ing more railroads and highways. But the 
administration of President Tiburcio Carias has 
created roads and schools to the limit of the na¬ 
tional budget. Civilization has been brought to 
remote communities. President Carias has estab¬ 
lished a government experimental farm, where 
tropical trees and crops from many parts of the 
world are tested for adaptation to the climate and 
the fertility of Honduras. 

Although the dark green banana plantations are 
most important in Honduran economy, the coun¬ 
try is also rich in minerals: lead, copper, iron, 
aluminum, coal, antimony, zinc, and nickel exist 
in quantities worth mining, and Honduras only 
needs outside help to develop these resources. 
Spanish conquerors of the 16th and 17th centuries 
found Honduras a literal gold and silver mine, and 
millions of pesos’ worth of metal were extracted 
from lodes such as the Rosario mine at San Juancito. 
Indians still recover some $100,000 worth of gold 
and silver each year from the sands of the Rosario, 
Espana, and Almendras rivers. 

Mahogany has been exhausted almost every¬ 
where else in the Caribbean area,, but Honduras 
still has an ample supply. The trees are scattered 
through thousands of acres of forest; often there 
are not more than one or two mahogany trees to 
the square mile. Harvesting the mahogany in¬ 
volves a peculiar and ancient technique: scouts 
climb high trees and peer about for the crown of 
the mahogany trees, which often reach a height 
of a hundred feet and stand twelve or more feet 
in diameter. Jungle thickness prevents their being 
located from the ground. Planes are often used 
today to spot the trees. Native custom requires 
that mahogany be cut in the rainy season and by 
the light of the waning moon, when the tree is 
richer in color and freer from sap. 

Honduras declared war on Japan on December 8, 
and on Germany and Italy December 12. One- 


22 



year military service has been made compulsory in 
Honduras, and in peacetime it has had a standing 
army of 5,000, with 20,000 reserves. An aviation 
school has recently been opened, under the guid¬ 


ance of men trained in the United States. Road 
improvements will make possible the speedy trans¬ 
portation of troops and materials as well as the 
passage of peaceful commerce. 


INDIA 


Area. —1,575,000 square miles—half the size of the United States. Population.— 
389,000,000—three times larger than the United States. Capital. —New Delhi. 
Principal cities. —Calcutta, Bombay, . Madras. Chief products. —Jute, rice, 
wheat, sugar, cotton (originally an Indian plant), wool, manganese, tea, tobacco, 
leather, mica, iron, steel. India has the largest single steel-producing plant in the 
British Empire. 


T HE SUBCONTINENT of India is a vast penin¬ 
sula extending dagger-like from continental 
Asia into the Indian Ocean. It contains one-fifth 
of the world’s population and a substantial share 
of the world’s natural riches. It is a land of 
enormous contrasts. There are vast arid regions 
in western India and there are the rich, fertile 
plains of the Ganges; there is piercing cold in the 
Himalayan mountains along the northern border, 
and jungle heat in the southern interior; there are 
tall, light-skinned men in the north and short, 
dark-skinned men in the south; there are violent 
contrasts in religion, politics, race, culture, society, 
and wealth. 

A stream of invading peoples—the Aryans, 
Greeks, Scythians, the Huns, Afghans, and Moguls 
—came and left their individual marks. (India 
now has about 100 languages although only 16 are 
spoken at all extensively.) Indian civilization 
dates back nearly 5,000 years. A highly developed 
culture flourished there before the Greeks entered 
Greece. India’s contributions to art and philoso¬ 
phy have received world recognition. The works 
of her most recent great literary figure, Rabin¬ 
dranath Tagore, have been translated into English 
and many other languages. 

Today nine-tenths of India’s people live in mud- 
walled thatch-roofed villages and 75 percent of 
them farm for a living. The men wear cotton 
waistcloths. The women wear loose cotton robes. 
As a whole they are a vegetarian people, living 
principally on rice, chapatty (a kind of wheat 
cake), and vegetables when they can afford them. 



However, the larger cities are cosmopolitan, with 
restaurants, movies, high-powered automobiles, 
well-paved streets, a modern communications 
system. 

Religion is the dominating force in India’s life, 
the root of most of her social and political differ¬ 
ences. Sixty-six percent of the people are Hindus; 
23 percent are Mohammedans. Other religious 
groups are the Sikhs, from whom a considerable 
section of the army is recruited, Jains, Christians, 
and Parsees. 

Hindu society is rigidly organized. A man can 
rarely advance in either economic or social stand¬ 
ing through his own efforts. His place in society 
is normally determined by the accident of birth. 
From his parents he virtually inherits his occupa¬ 
tion and his social grouping. He eats, drinks, 


23 



marries, plays, and sorrows with the members of 
that group only. This is his “caste.” As he is born 
within its limits, he dies according to its rites. 

In theory there are four principal castes: the 
Brahmans, who are teachers and holy men, al¬ 
though they may have more ordinary occupations; 
the Kshatriyas or warriors; the Vaisyas, the com¬ 
mercial caste; the Sudras, who are largely tillers of 
the soil. Actually, there are hundreds of subcastes 
to fit all shades of occupation and locality. Below 
these again are about 50,000,000 Untouchables 
who, although Hindus, are considered to be so 
lowly that they must remain outside the caste sys¬ 
tem. In this way they are automatically excluded 
from many of the conveniences of daily life. They 
cannot drink at the same pumps, eat or touch the 
same food, use the same schools, as do the caste 
Hindus. Some of the upper castes consider them¬ 
selves polluted if the shadow of an Untouchable 
falls on them. 

Enlightened Indian leaders are trying to relax 
the caste system. Mahatma Gandhi, respected by 
all India, has done much to improve the lot of the 
Untouchables. Railroad travel, where all must rub 
elbows; the radio, which all may hear; new indus¬ 
trial factories, where workers are drawn from all 
groups; the army, where men of every caste fight 
side by side; science, whose benefits rich and poor 
alike may share; and, above ail, the extension of 
formal education are helping to break the barriers. 

The Moslems do not recognize the caste system. 
With them all men are born equal. Moslems wor¬ 
ship only one god, Allah, whereas the Hindus 
worship many gods. 

In the realm of politics, there are two principal 
nationalist groups, divided along religious lines. 
The Congress Party, led by Gandhi and Pandit 
Jawaharlal Nehru, is largely a Hindu organization 
although it does have considerable Moslem and 
other non-Hindu support. The Congress seeks full 
self-rule for India. The chief Moslem political 
organization is the Moslem League, under the 
presidency of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, whose plat¬ 
form is Pakistan , which asks for a division of India 
into Hindu and Moslem autonomous states. The 
Congress and the Moslem League are mutually 
opposed and both are opposed to the British. In 
an effort to unite the country behind a compact 
war effort, Sir Stafford Cripps, a member of Great 
Britain’s War Cabinet, brought to India in March 


1942, a plan for dominion status for India imme¬ 
diately after the war. This plan was not acceptable 
to the Indian leaders. 

The administration of India is divided among the 
eleven provinces that make up British India and the 
562 separate principalities known as the Indian 
States. British India contains slightly more than 
half the country’s total area and about three- 
fourths of its ‘population. Each province has a 
British-appointed governor and a legislative as¬ 
sembly elected by the people of that province. 
The central government consists of a governor- 
general (Viceroy) with an Executive Council and 
a two-house legislature. The hereditary princes 
are the sole rulers of the Indian States. The Vice¬ 
roy has ultimate control over the defense and for¬ 
eign affairs of both the Indian States and British 
India. 

India’s War Effort 

India has made gallant contributions to the war 
not only in manpower and raw materials but also 
in the field of industry. India now makes an 
impressive amount of “small” war supplies, notably 
fuses, grenades, land mines, shell cases, other 
ordnance parts. She is also building mine sweep¬ 
ers, submarine chasers, motor launches, tugs. In 
clothing and accessory equipment her production 
has been particularly significant. She now turns 
out 8,000,000 pieces of military clothing a month. 
She makes such accessories as boots, puttees, pith 
helmets, mosquito netting, tents, sand bags, 550 
billion yards of cotton a year. Armor plate is 
being produced for armored cars; motor bodies 
are under construction. Airplanes are now being 
assembled there. 

India’s peacetime army of 175,000, larger than 
that of any of the British Dominions, has grown to 
over a million men without any form of conscrip¬ 
tion. Recruits have volunteered far more rapidly 
than they can be absorbed into the combat forces. 
Indian troops, who firmly believe they are disgraced 
if they are forced to retreat, fought heroically at 
Sidi Barrani and Tobruk. In Ethiopia, the Italian 
Duke of Aosta surrendered to an Indian Division. 
India is also .expanding her small navy and air 
force. Home defense forces, air-raid patrols, 
medical units, supply corps, women’s auxiliaries 
have been organized. 


24 


LUXEMBOURG 


T HE memory of feudal days survives in the 
picturesque castles of Luxembourg. Its 999 
square miles represent all that is left of a large 
duchy which, through the Burgundian, Spanish, 
Austrian, Belgian, and Netherlands periods of its 
history, changed size and shape with each succeed¬ 
ing treaty and family pact. But the spirit of in¬ 
dependence^ and democracy burns brightly in the 
hearts of its 297,000 people. Driving at 60 miles 
an hour from one end of Luxembourg to the other, 
one would be out of the country in less than an hour 
and a half or crossing it one would need but 34 
minutes. 

Because the Duchy has never been strong enough 
to defend itself, in spite of what, in medieval times, 
was considered the almost impregnable fortress of 
the city of Luxembourg itself, its fate has always 
been what its neighbors or treaties have made it. 

In 1859 when the first railroad connecting 
Luxembourg with the world was built, a poem 
in the Luxembourg dialect was written which 
summed up the spirit of the people—they were 
glad to welcome the world but wanted no further 
foreign entanglements. This became the national 
song: 

Come ye from Prussia, Belgium, France, 

To view our land with friendly glance 
Ask the people, near and far, 

“We will remain just what we are!” 

We are contented with our fate, 

Devoted to our native State! 

Millions can it never count, 

But, to its. people, paramount! 

And we, joyous, shout as one 
No better land is blessed by Sun! 

But the country was not permitted to remain 
what it was. It became a completely separate 
nation in 1867, and its independence was then guar¬ 
anteed by the great powers, but it was denied the 
right to arm in self-defense. Luxembourg was 
therefore easily overrun by Germany in 1914, and 
again in May 1940. The Nazis appointed a 
Gauleiter to take charge of the country. German 
was proclaimed the only official language, and on 
August 15, 1940, the Gauleiter declared the con¬ 
stitution void. At the same time he abolished the 
customs barrier between Germany and Luxem¬ 


bourg, and soon abolished the Diet and the Council 
of State. 

And what was the democracy of Luxembourg? 
Although the sovereign power of the country rests 
in the nation, the Grand Duchess is the head'of 
the State. Every adult over 21 years of age, male 
or female, has the right to vote. Proportional 
representation assured the representation of all 
parties in the government, which consists of a 
Chamber of Deputies of 55 members, each of whom 
must be over 26 years of age. There are also five 
chambers for traders and industrialists, agricul¬ 
turists, artisans, private employees, and workmen, 
which have the power to create and maintain insti¬ 
tutions and the right to propose bills which must 
be submitted to the Chamber of Deputies. They 
must also be consulted before laws affecting their 
professional interests are passed. 

The motto of the House of Nassau of which Grand 
Duchess Charlotte is a member is “I will main¬ 
tain.” Part of what the Luxembourgers would 
like to maintain is the large iron and steel industry. 
Until the Nazis struck, headquarters of the Inter¬ 
national Steel Cartel were there. The Grand 
Duchy, which occupies an area four-fifths the size 
of Rhode Island, includes the north end of the rich 
Lorraine iron-ore basin. In May 1938, 21,388 
workers were employed in the blast furnaces, steel 
works, and mines in the Grand Duchy; of these 
4,199 were aliens. The value in francs of the 1937 
production was as follows: iron ore, 150,693,000; 



25 





cast iron, 992,914,790; and steel, 1,256,219,692. 
Luxembourg is the seventh greatest steel-producing 
country in the world. 

Despite the importance of its industries and 
despite the not too fertile soil, 32 percent of the 
population is engaged in farming. Roses and wine 
are large items in export, the wine industry having 
prospered greatly since California vines were 
grafted to the Luxembourg vines. 


To bring back to her country the independence 
it had enjoyed, Grand Duchess Charlotte, the con¬ 
stitutional sovereign, left Luxembourg and estab¬ 
lished her government partly in London, partly in 
Montreal, where the United States Minister to 
Canada is also the United States Minister to 
Luxembourg. Only the success of the United 
Nations can restore her liberties to helpless 
Luxembourg. 


MEXICO 


The Cornucopia 

Mexico is shaped like a cornucopia, the horn of 
plenty. This is symbolic: Mexico has been called 
the Treasure Chest of the World because of the 
vast wealth of valuable minerals which lie locked 
in the Mexican earth. These resources are the 
nation’s golden promise for the future. 

Government 

Mexico is a federal republic. There are 28 states. 
Congress is made up of the Senate and the Chamber 
of Deputies. Mexico City, the capital, is a metro¬ 
politan city of 1,750,000, almost three times as large 
as San Francisco. It is located on a plateau 7,500 
feet high. 

Size and Population 

Size: 763,944 square miles. Mexico is three times 
as big as Texas, four times as big as Spain, one- 
fourth as big as the United States. Population: 
19,478,000. 



History 

This was the Indian empire of the Aztecs con¬ 
quered by Cortes in 1521. Mexico became inde¬ 
pendent of Spain in 1821 after 11 years of struggle. 
The revolutionary patriot, Benito Juarez, was one 
of those who contributed most to the establishment 
of a free republic. 

Strategic Metals 

Mexico produces silver, copper, lead, molybde¬ 
num, antimony, zinc, mercury, manganese, coal—- 
all vital in munitions-making. Some 43,000,000 
barrels of oil flowed out of Mexico’s oil wells in 
1939. 

Farm Products 

Sugar, wheat, bananas, vanilla, sisal, coffee, 
cotton, corn, beans, cattle are raised. Approxi¬ 
mately 70 percent of the working people are 
farmers, but they live on only 7 percent of the land. 
The rest is either mountain or desert too arid to 
till. 

Many Tongues 

Spanish is the official language of the country, 
but more than 50 different Indian languages and 
dialects are spoken. 

The Life Line 

The friendship of Mexico, our ancient neighbor 
to the south, is of inestimable value to the United 
States, both in peace and in war. Two coast 
lines—1,080 miles on the Atlantic and 2,860 miles 
on the Pacific—offer bays and inlets where enemy 
invaders might make landings on the American 


26 







continent. And through Mexico also runs the 
great paved road which, when finished, will be 
our overland life line to the Panama Canal. 

This is the Inter-American Highway. Mexico 
finished the section of the road from Laredo, Texas, 
to Mexico City in 1936. Since then thousands of 
automobiles have sped over the rocky tableland 
which for countless earlier centuries was traversed 
only by burros and shoeless men with burdens, on 
their backs. This road is now being cut through 
from Mexico City to the border of Guatemala. 

This road, which has brought face to face the 
modern world and a civilization in places little 
changed since the Aztecs, bisects the three lands 
of Mexico—the dry temperate lands of the 
plateaus, the cold lands of the mountains, the hot 
lands of the tropical valleys and coastal plains. 
To most of Mexico, water is the most important 
thing in life. The national emblem tells the legend 
of an arid land’s thirst: an eagle on a cactus on a 
rock in the middle of a lake. 

The War 

On June 1, 1942, President Manuel Avila 
Camacho proclaimed—in accordance with the 
declaration passed by the Federal Congress on 
May 29 and 30—that a state of war had existed 
between Mexico and the three Axis nations since 
May 22. On June 5 Mexico adhered to the Decla¬ 
ration by United Nations, thus associating herself 
fully with the crusade to wipe out Fascism. 


The declaration of war was Mexico’s answer to 
the sinking, on May 13 and May 20, of Mexican 
merchant ships with a heavy loss of life. But even 
before declaring war, Mexico had chosen her side. 

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Mexico broke “off 
relations with the Axis nations. Axis funds were 
frozen by President Avila Camacho. Mexican 
soil and Mexican ports were offered to the United 
States for the uses of the military. Mexico made an 
agreement to sell practically all of her exportable 
strategic materials to the United States. 

Mexico has a regular army of 70,000. There are, 
in addition, some 65,000 trained reserves. The 
Air Force has about 100 planes, and excellent 
soldier pilots. Troops will not be sent abroad 
but will cooperate fully with the armies of the 
United States in defending the long continental 
coast lines. 

Mexico will be of assistance to her United Nations 
allies in fighting the submarine menace. The 
Navy has three 2,000-ton gunboats, eleven armored 
coastal patrol vessels, and one heavy transport. 
The coastal patrol vessels can make more than 
26 knots, thus exceeding the best speed submarines 
can manage in surface cruising. 

Mexico is in the war until victory is won. The 
Army is at its defense posts. Labor has suspended 
strikes for the duration of the conflict. The Navy 
is busy all along the wavering coasts where the 
white water of two oceans beats against the land 
that Cortes and Montezuma knew. 


THE NETHERLANDS 


Area. —13,600 square miles. Population. —9,000,000. Ruler. —Queen Wil- 
helmina. Prime Minister. —Pieter S. Gerbrandy. Capital. —Amsterdam. Seat 
of government. —The Hague. Present seat of government. —London. Chief 
products. —Textiles, coal, butter, cheese. The Netherlands overseas terri¬ 
tories. —Netherlands East Indies, Netherlands West Indies, Surinam. 


T HE NAZI BOMBERS that brought war to 
Holland on May 10, 1940, shattered a peace 
unbroken for over a hundred years. The Dutch 
were not cowards or appeasers—they were free 
men, civilized men, men of peace. In their small, 
flat country on the North Sea, one-quarter of its 


land won back by dikes and drainage from under¬ 
neath the water, they had built' a prosperous, 
modern, forward-looking nation. 

A fifth of the people of Holland earned their 
living on the land—mostly on small holdings of 
less than fifty acres. Dutch cheese and butter, 


27 



Dutch tulips, Dutch cereals and other crops were 
famous for their quality. The land was fertile, and 
the people worked it well. 

Another fifth of the people lived by commerce. 
The Dutch believed in trade; they always had. 
Their land was a crossroads where three great 
rivers came from inside Europe to the sea. They 
had 922 seagoing ships, and 19,280 more on their 
inland waterways. From all the world came raw 
materials, and to the world went Holland’s manu¬ 
factures and her food. 

Two-fifths of Holland lived by making things. 
Ships were built and textiles woven. Coal was 
mined, and tin was smelted. Diamonds were cut 
in Amsterdam. Holland was crowded and active. 

Holland was civilized. Holland had the lowest 
death rate in Europe. Holland had education for 
all. Seven Dutchmen had won Nobel prizes. 
They had free speech, a free press, religious 
freedom. 

Holland was small, no match in armed strength 
for the Nazi hordes. In 5 days the country was 
overrun. The great city of Rotterdam was bombed 
into ruins. Queen Wilhelmina, 50 years a Queen 
of peace, escaped with her Government to London. 
Holland was down but the Netherlands Empire 
continued the war. 

In the 19 months between the Nazi attack on 


Holland and that other treachery, in the Pacific, 
the Dutch fought on, and made ready. They 
smashed the Nazi fifth column in their Indies terri¬ 
tories. The single code word “Berlin,” flashed to 
the Indies on the tenth of May 1940, had blocked 
the Nazi plans. The Dutch still had much to 
guard: 

The Netherlands East Indies—southeast from 
Asia, northwest from Australia—are great crowded 
islands where the world came for rubber, tin, and 
oil, cinchona bark and kapok—for pepper, fiber, 
coconut, and palm oil. The islands together were 
a fourth the size of the United States, with half as 
many people. 

To this rich land Dutchmen had come centuries 
before to trade. They had stayed to rule and 
pacify and teach. They had fought disease and 
ignorance. They and Indonesian leaders were 
slowly working toward a modern freedom. 

But it was a land that war lords wanted. The 
Japanese were coming, and before they came the 
Dutch were ready to fight. On the day of Pearl 
Harbor the Dutch declared war on the Japanese. 
They fought—for weeks the Netherlands navy and 
the air corps sank a ship a day. They lost—but not 
before the Japs had paid heavily and not before 
defiant will had ruined all that could help the 
enemy. Five hundred million dollars was blown 
up so the Japs should not have oil for months. 

Dutchmen and Indonesians still resist in the 
Indies. Fighting men of the navy, marines, and 
air corps and a few officials have been taken to 
Australia. Their families and the other Dutch 
remain to share the lot of the Indonesians. The 
Dutch Navy is still in action. Dutch ships still 
carry men and guns and food for the United 
Nations. Men of the Dutch Legion are in England, 
in Canada, in the Dutch West Indies, and in 
Surinam (Dutch Guiana). These last free Dutch 
territories are important. In Curasao and Aruba 
are great refineries for Venezuelan oil. In Surinam 
is bauxite for aluminum. 

The Dutch will fight on, however long the 
struggle. They will come eventually through 
invasion and defeat to victory and peace. 


28 




NEW ZEALAND 



“We arc only a small young nation, but wc 
are one and all a band of brothers, and wc 
march forward with a union of hearts and wills 
to a common destiny.”—M. J. Savage, late 
Prime Minister, on September 6, 1939. 

The People 

Ninety-four out of every 100 New Zealanders are 
of British origin. Four out of every 100 are 
Maoris—the natives who were there before the 
white men. 

Their War Effort 

New Zealand’s men and women are completely 
mobilized for war. The fighting forces number 
250,000 men, fully trained and equipped. Half of 
all males between the ages of 16 and 60 are in the 
fighting forces. 

New Zealand’s expeditionary forces number 
50,000 men, stationed in Egypt, Libya, and the 
Fiji Islands. These forces have fought in Greece, 
Crete, and Libya. 

New Zealand airmen have flown with the R. A. F. 
from Iceland to Singapore. Many thousands of 
them are in service abroad. 

New Zealand’s two cruisers have covered them¬ 
selves with glory. The Achilles helped to defeat 
the Graf Spee. The Leander sank an Italian raider 
in the Indian Ocean. 


New Zealand’s home front is tightly organized 
for war. Peacetime industries, such as textiles, 
clothes, and shoes, have been converted to military 
needs. Labor is conscripted. All prices are con¬ 
trolled. War spending will be nearly three times 
as much in 1942 as it was in 1941. Taxes, already 
high, are going higher. Direct taxes reach a 
maximum rate of 90 percent on earned income of 
$ 12 , 000 . , 

Labor is scarce, and luxury services have dis¬ 
appeared. Sugar and tea are rationed, but most 
other foods are plentiful, for New Zealand is a 
great meat and dairy-producing country. Pleasure 
driving is over for the duration; the gasoline ration 
allows only enough to drive a car forty miles a 
month. 

The war factories are turning out gun-carriers, 
mortars, grenades, and bombs. As more 'and 
more women enter the factories, the day of all-out 
production is close at hand. 

Among the United Nations, it would be hard to 
find a people who are fulfilling their own par¬ 
ticular part more effectively or more gallantly. 
New Zealand is, in every sense, a United Nation. 


New Zealand’s two islands are slightly smaller in 
area than the British Isles. Together they are 
about the same size as Colorado. New Zealand’s 
population of 1,600,000 people is one-thirtieth that 
of Britain—and about the same as that of the 
American city, Detroit. Its nearest neighbor, 
Australia, is 1,200 miles across the sea, while the 
British look 20 miles across the Channel and see 
the French—and now the Nazis—on the other side. 

New Zealand is a good example of what the 
British might have done with more space and less 
Europe; with a temperate climate that had not only 
plenty of rain but plenty of sunshine; with a clean 
new country which boasted all nature’s beauties 
and most of nature’s blessings, from snow-capped 
mountains, high waterfalls, lakes, and pine forests 
to rich pasture lands and fine natural harbors. 

What New Zealanders have done in 102 years 
is to build a utopia for ordinary people. The 
migration from England was essentially a farmer- 
mechanic migration and, like the earliest settle- 


29 










ment of our own shores, a family migration. This 
fact determined the character and pattern of the 
hardy, healthy, provincial life of New Zealand 
today. 

If anyone is looking for the good life that we are 
fighting for, let him look at New Zealand in the 
days before the war. In 1938, New Zealand had 
no extremes of poverty or of wealth; it had the 
second lowest death rate and the lowest infant 
mortality rate in the world. It had plenty of 
houses—one to a family. It had little crime. It 
had a high standard of living and plenty to eat. 
The average New Zealander ate more bread, 
butter, flour, and sugar than the average American, 
twice as much beef, twelve times as much lamb 
and mutton. 

The New Zealander was, and still is, protected 
by social insurance against sickness, unemploy¬ 


ment, and want in old age. A model for both 
Britain and the United States, New Zealand was 
a pioneer in the years before World War I in old- 
age pensions, State fire and accident insurance, 
State aid to the farmers, wage and hour laws, 
recognition of collective bargaining, and votes for 
women. More recent laws provide health insur¬ 
ance, free medical and dental care for school chil¬ 
dren, and free milk in the schools. 

Yes, it was a good life in New Zealand before 
the war—a life that fused the homely traditions of 
the mother country with the inspiration of the wide 
open spaces and happy isolation of the South 
Pacific. For while New Zealand is the farthest 
from “home” of all the members of the British 
family of nations, it is as British as tea and crum¬ 
pets, rugby football, horse racing, and plum 
pudding. 


NICARAGUA 

Area. —57,000 square miles. Central America’s largest country, about the size 
of Georgia. Population. —1,380,000. Third largest in Central America, and about 
one-third as large as Georgia’s. Capital city. —Managua (population 118,400). 
Other important cities. —Leon (population 38,600). Granada (population 22,300). 
Products. — Gold: 60 percent of total exports. Coffee: 20 to 30 percent of total ex¬ 
ports. Bananas, cotton, sugar, cocoa, lumber and dyewoods, hides and skins, maize, 
sisal and abac& (substitutes for hemp). Climate. —Tropical on the coasts; wet, 
especially on the Caribbean coast; cooler in the mountains. 



N ICARAGUA is the largest Central American 
republic. The Nicaraguans are descendants 
of Spanish conquerors and peaceful Indian farmers. 


The majority of them are Ladinos , of mixed Indian 
and white blood. They are lively, gay, and 
emancipated. Their national life reflects many 
Americanisms: there are more than 200 baseball 
teams; their drugstores, like ours, are piled high 
with much besides drugs—they sell groceries, 
clothing, hardware, jewelry, and gardening equip¬ 
ment. 

Nicaragua is famous for the perfection of its vol¬ 
canic peaks; for its two great blue lakes; for its 
ancient Indian monoliths and Spanish and colonial 
cities; for being the birthplace and burial spot of 
one of the greatest lyric poets in Spanish literature, 
Ruben Dario; for the tenacity of its people, which 
has allowed them to survive earthquakes and civil 
wars. 

Although in 1940 its chief export was gold, 


30 




hills, high green mountains, rivers and lakes, its 
stretches of forest dotted with farm cottages—looks 
not unlike northern New England. But the high¬ 
land country is isolated, roads are difficult to build. 
Nicaragua’s important cities lie in the plain on the 
Pacific side. Representing about one-quarter of 
Nicaragua’s area, the Pacific plain -houses nearly 
three-quarters of the population. 

To a Nicaraguan, the two most important things 
about his country are the two lakes: Lake Mana¬ 
gua, 40 miles long and 10 to 16 miles wide, domi¬ 
nated by the smoking volcano of Momotombo; and 
Lake Nicaragua, 100 miles long and over 40 miles 
wide, the largest inland body of water between 
Lake Michigan and Lake Titicaca in South'America. 
Lake Nicaragua gives the country its peculiarly 
strategic position. Connected with the Atlantic 
Ocean by the San Juan River, it is separated from 
the Pacific by only 13 miles of land. Its surface is 
106 feet above sea level. A cut through those 13 
miles (the lowest point in the western continental 
mountain chain), plus a widening and deepening 
of the San Juan River, would result in a through 
water course from sea to sea. Nicaraguans very 
much want this canal built, not only for hemisphere 
defense, but because it would, at last, provide 
quick communication between their coasts. Such 
a canal would be 180 miles long, compared with 
the 50 of the Panama Canal, and would take from 
eight to ten years to build. 

NORWAY 

Area, —124,556 square miles; almost three times as large as Tennessee. Popu¬ 
lation. —2,950,000; about that of Tennessee. Coast line. —Island-dotted and 
fiord-cut, making a total of 12,000 miles, or half the distance around the equator. 
Possessions. —Spitzbergen, a group of islands in the Arctic Ocean, with rich coal 
mines still in the hands of the United Nations; other minor islands to the north of 
Norway and in the Antarctic. Government. —A constitutional, hereditary mon¬ 
archy, with legislative power vested in the Storting, the parliament of the sovereign 
people. Capital. —Oslo. Temporary seat of government. —London. King.— 

Haakon VII, who in 1905 was elected to and accepted the crown on invitation of the 
Norwegian people. The land. —Norway is mountainous. 72.2 percent is unpro¬ 
ductive, 24.2 percent is forest-covered, 3.6 percent is under cultivation or otherwise 
being used. Many waterfalls are of great potential industrial value. The prinqipal 
exports. —Paper and pulp; food products, chiefly fish and fish products; base metals 
and manufactures thereof. The minor exports. —Fatty substances and waxes, 
including products made from whale oil; machinery; hides, skins, leathers, and 
leather work. 


Nicaragua’s economy is founded on the land—on 
coffee, bananas, cotton, coconuts, sugar, cocoa, 
tobacco, cattle—but the country has always been 
a nation of city dwellers. Since 1858, Managua 
has been the capital, picked as a compromise after 
years of rivalry between the colonial cities of Leon 
and Granada. From early Spanish colonial days 
Leon has represented the liberal segment of 
Nicaragua; Ruben Dario lies buried there. From 
Leon come the nation’s lawyers, physicians, writers, 
intellectuals; it is the city of artisans and small 
landowners, whose little fincas (farms) are scattered 
in a wide plain around the city. It is a city of 
passionate political opinion and discussion. In it 
you will find splendid old Spanish churches. 
Granada, on the other hand, is stanchly conserva¬ 
tive. Seventy miles south of Leon, it is the home 
of aristocrats—wealthy merchants and large land- 
owners, whose cattle ranches and cocoa and sugar¬ 
cane plantations stretch for miles around the upper 
end of Lake Nicaragua. 

Three major regions compose Nicaragua: the 
plain just inland from the Pacific Coast with its 
cities and two great lakes; the hot, flat, wet Mos¬ 
quito Coast along the Caribbean with its swamps 
and jungles and banana plantations; and the high¬ 
land country—lying between the other two and 
rising sharply from the lakes to 7,000 feet, then 
sloping gently to the Caribbean. Seen from the 
air, the highland country—with its rolling green 


31 



N ORWAY is a land of rocky soil and deep cleft 
bays. From forests and mines its people ciit 
timber and dug iron for their industrial plants. 
They built, meanwhile, the world’s fourth largest 
merchant marine. Farmers, sailors, woodsmen, 
industrial workers, fishermen—these people loved 
freedom. And to safeguard that freedom these 
people learned to pull together. 

There were many things that made this lesson 
hard to learn—mountains cut off community from- 
community, ships would be gone from home for 
months, a living was hard to dig from the less than 
a quarter of Norway’s soil that is productive. But 
tor the common good, the Norwegians learned 
more and more how to cooperate with each other. 
And almost every group in Norwegian life—labor¬ 
ers, teachers, industrialists, nurses, ministers, law¬ 
yers, and men who sailed the seven seas—had its 
own cooperative organization which helped to dis¬ 
tribute the advantages of good times and cushion 
the shock of bad times. 

These people, so far north that one-third of their 
country is in the Arctic Circle, watched the war in 
Europe. To protect their neutrality, the Neutral¬ 
ity Defense Corps was called into active service to 
man the few coastal guns. The small navy was 
put on the alert. But Norway did not think there 
would really be an invasion. What had neutral 
Norway done to provoke an attack—from any¬ 
where, by any people? 

Yet on the morning of April 9, 1940, without 
warning, German warships steamed up the fiords, 


and German transport planes landed troops that 
took over the airfields. Astounded, the Nor¬ 
wegians watched this unbelievable thing, while the 
few Norwegian soldiers under arms fought bravely. 
Then from the cities the men hurried to assemble 
in the mountains and for 62 days, while British 
help came and then was forced to leave, the Nor¬ 
wegians fought for their independence, though 
many of their cities were in the hands of the Nazis. 
When finally the army was forced to surrender, the 
King and all the members of the government had 
already left the country, by vote of the Storting, to 
be free to carry on the war outside Norway. 

From the capital of the exiled government, Lon¬ 
don, two wars for Norwegian freedom are now 
being directed: the war inside Norway and the 
war outside Norway. 

For Norway is not really conquered. The Ger¬ 
mans may have physical possession of her iron and 
bauxite mines, her pulp factories, her water power, 
her fishing boats. But German militarism has not 
conquered the soul of Norway. About 2 percent 
of the population had voted for the Quisling Na¬ 
tional Socialist Party before the invasion. Once 
Quisling had been thrust into power in 1940 by 
the Nazis, Norwegians resisted him at every turn, 
using their democratic institutions as weapons of 
revolt. 

When Storm Troopers were permitted to break 
the law, the Norwegian Supreme Court resigned 
in a body. When the Quislings tried to head the 
labor unions, the members refused to pay dues. 
When the Nazi-directed police stopped a service at 
Trondheim Cathedral and the Nazis decreed that 
all youths must join a Nazi organization, the seven 
Bishops resigned, and the clergy followed their lead. 
Hundreds of teachers chose to endure hard labor 
rather than join the Nazi teachers organization. 

While the Norwegian government was still in 
Norway, an order was broadcast to all Norwegian 
ships to put into British or other allied ports in 
order to escape German capture. Not a single 
ship disobeyed this order, though the Nazi-con¬ 
trolled Oslo radio gave conflicting instructions. 
Today, with her merchant marine which before 
the war was of 4,900,000 tons, Norway is making a 
most valuable contribution to the United Nations. 
Her boats, manned in 1940 by 30,000 seamen, are 
carrying supplies to battle lines all over the world. 
Many ships have been torpedoed and many lives 


32 




have been lost, but the Norwegian seamen who 
escape go back to the battle again. 

The most valuable part of the merchant marine 
is the tanker fleet which carries more than 50 per- 
4 cent of the oil and gasoline needed in Great 
Britain. The Norwegian floating whale factories 
that used to bring whale oil from the Antarctic 
are now tankers for aviation gasoline. Norwegian 
naval vessels, including many whale “catch-boats,” 
are patrolling from the Caribbean to the Red Sea. 
Norwegian naval bases have been established at 
Durban in Africa, in Australia, in the Mediterra¬ 


nean, in Iceland, Great Britain, Canada, and in the 
Caribbean. And Norwegians trained in Canada 
are flying under Norwegian colors in Iceland and 
Great Britain and are serving in the Air Transport 
Command across the Atlantic and the Pacific. 
The Norwegian Army protects sectors of the British 
shore and Iceland. Norwegians take part in the 
Commando raids. 

In spite of all handicaps, the Norwegian Govern¬ 
ment continues to make payments on its loans and 
to care for the soldiers and sailors fighting under 
the Norwegian flag. 


PANAMA 


P ANAMA is the bridge that links the Americas 
and the gate that joins the seas. In the Canal ? 
Panama contains fifty miles of water for which half 
the world’s navies may one day contend. 

Panama is a very small country with a very big 
place in the modem world. In size—some 34,000 
square miles—it is a little larger than the State of 
Maine; in population—more than 600,000 people— 
it is about the same as San Francisco. 

The climate of Panama is hot—80° is the average 
temperature—and the land is tropical. It is a 
country of mountains and jungles. In the jungles 
grow the brilliantly colored flowers and trees of the 
tropics; in them live lizards and monkeys, alli¬ 
gators and parakeets. It is a land of water; hun¬ 
dreds of streams flow into the Pacific on one side 
or the Caribbean on the other. 

The cities of Panama are old. Panama City was 
founded in 1519, a century and a year before the 
Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. This city was 
destroyed in 1671 by Morgan the buccaneer and a 
new one was founded not far away. 

Panama is the youngest of the New World’s 
republics in age, and one of the oldest in its record 
of fighting for freedom. Panama declared its inde¬ 
pendence from the Spanish throne in 1821. Today 
one of the most important stands for the freedom 
of the United Nations is being made in tiie defense 
of the Canal. 

The Republic of Panama is now a joint partner 
with the United States in the defense of the Canal, 
which is powerfully guarded by American land, 
sea, and air forces. These defenses extend from 



the Canal Zone—a strip of land ten miles wide 
from sea to sea, leased by the United States—to 
points hundreds of miles away in other United 
Nations of the Americas. 

The people of Panama, like the people of most 
nations, are of many races—white and black and 
brown. They speak two languages: Spanish and— 
because of the Canal—English. Some of the 
Indians of Panama enjoy a large degree of inde¬ 
pendent self-government. Within 50 miles of 
Panama City’s cosmopolitan shopping district live 
Indians who go about their daily lives very much 
as their forefathers did in the days of Balboa. 

The Canal is Panama’s main source of livelihood, 


33 






in peacetime or in war. It has been estimated that 
almost a third of the population lives from it in one 
way or another. But the people of Panama also 
raise bananas, coconuts, sugarcane, coffee, tobacco, 
corn, and rubber. There is gold mining on the 
land and pearl fishing in the waters of Panama. 
Lead, copper, asbestos, and manganese come 
from Panama. 

Columbus first set foot on the mainland of the 
New World in Panama. It was from a mountain in 
Darien that Balboa first looked on the Pacific Ocean. 

The trail the Spaniards hacked through the 
jungle was for two hundred years the “Road of 
Gold.” Over it went the fabulous treasures of 
Peru on their way to the galleons of Spain. Span- 

THE PHI 

I N THE HISTORY of man’s unending struggle 
for freedom, there have been defeats greater 
than any victories. These were defeats of a few 
fighting against many, fighting to their death 
without hope but with unconquerable faith. They 
were defeats, bitter and crushing, but not final. 
The peoples defeated at Thermopylae, Alesia, 
Kosovo, Warsaw, and Madrid learned in defeat 
to know themselves as nations. The latest of these 
heroic defeats was Bataan. 

Bataan is the peninsula which forms one pillar 
of the gate to Manila Bay in the Philippine Islands. 
It is a tiny peninsula about 30 miles long and at 
most 20 miles wide—some 600 square miles of 



iards, Englishmen, Frenchmen, and men of the 
Americas dreamed and planned and fought to 
join the oceans at Panama for centuries. 

The Forty-Niners on their way to California’s gold 
fields followed the old trail of the “Road of Gold.” 

The first railroad to join the two oceans was com¬ 
pleted in Panama in 1855, at the cost of $8,000,000 
and many lives. 

The Republic of Panama declared war on Japan 
on December 8 and on Germany and Italy on 
December 12. 

Panama acts in concord with the United Nations. - 
In doing so it serves the best interests of Panama 
for whatever endangers the Canal endangers the 
country that surrounds it. 

IPPINES 

steep hills, deep gullies, tangled jungle. Here the 
men of the Philippines made a last stand against 
American forces in 1901; and here in 1942 Filipinos 
and Americans together made a last stand against 
the Japanese. 

For 4 months after the fall of Manila, 27,000 
Filipinos and 9,000 Americans on Bataan kept per¬ 
haps 300,000 Japanese from other battlefronts. 
General Douglas MacArthur, who organized the 
defense of Bataan, said of them afterward: “No 
army has ever done so much with so little.” They 
had a few much-patched P-40’s—because the 
United States air force in the Philippines was 
practically wiped out on the first day of the war. 
They had a few cannon, a few tanks, a few ammu¬ 
nition dumps. From the middle of January they 
were on short rations. (Two out of every three 
supply ships trying to slip through were sunk.) 
Toward the end they were feverish with malaria, 
and there was no quinine; they were wounded, and 
had gangrene, and there was no ether. But for 4 
months, from their fox-holes, from under the giant 
jungle roots, they threw back wave after wave of 
attackers. The Japanese had to send their ablest 
commander—Yamashita, conqueror of Singapore 
—new supplies of tanks and long-range artillery, 
swarms of bombing planes and tens of thousands of 
fresh troops, before the men on Bataan could be 
blasted out. They were conquered only when they 
could no longer stand on their feet to fight. And 


34 




even then, a few managed to carry on the battle. 
For another month, Corregidor held out under 
continuous bombing and artillery fire. 

Of the 36,000 defenders of Bataan, 27,000 were 
Filipinos. The Americans called them all “Joe”— 
out of affection. “Joe” had other and more specific 
names. “Joe” was Captain Jesus Villamor, the 
great pursuit pilot of the Filipino Air Corps, lead¬ 
ing five battered pursuit planes against three dozen 
or so Japanese bombers. He was Major Gregorio 
Sandiko, who with 28 of the Philippine Constab¬ 
ulary met the shiploads of Japanese landing at 
Legaspi and fought them until he and ^24 of his 
constables were dead. “Joe” was Father Getulio 
Ingal who went into occupied Manila to take news 
to the Philippine Scouts’ families, was captured, 
and escaped under fire to go back to Bataan. He 
was Corporal Narciso Ortilano, who was charged 
in his machine-gun nest by 11 Japanese and killed 
all of them. He was the nameless wounded Scout 
who said to his nurse, when he found he could never 
fight the Japanese again, “I do not want to live 
now, Mum.” 

The Islands 

The Philippine Islands stretch for 1,150 miles on 
the far side of the Pacific, some 7,000 miles west of 
San Francisco. The southernmost islands lie close 
to British North Borneo; the northernmost is only 
65 miles from Japanese-held Formosa. The total 
land area is about the same as that of the British Isles. 

There are 7,083 islands. Only 2,441 have names. 
Only 462 have an area of as much as one square 
mile. Some are no more than tiny volcanic rocks 
in the Sulu Sea. But some are very large: Luzon, 
in the north, with the capital city of Manila; 
Mindanao in the south. Other important islands 
are Mindoro, Panay, Palawan, Cebu, Negros. 
Their hot, flat little towns have strange and lovely 
Malay names, known to every sailor in Far Eastern 
waters: Iloilo Tuguegarao, Zamboanga. 

The economy of the Philippines is 80 percent 
agricultural. Between the high mountain chains, 
where gold and other ores are mined, and the dense 
tropical forests of the larger islands are fertile 
plains where the Filipinos grow corn and cassava. 
Banana, coconut, and papaya trees bear fruit the 
year round. But the great staple food is rice. The 
rice terraces of the primitive Ifugao people in 
northern Luzon are among the world’s great engi¬ 
neering miracles: 30 to 50 feet high, they are 


carved out of the mountainsides, walled up with 
rock and clay, fertilized and irrigated with precise 
science. Industrial crops are sugar cane, copra, 
tobacco, pineapple, and abaca or Manila hemp, 
of which the Philippines is the world’s chief source. 
The rich land could grow many crops besides. 

Land, before the war, was the chief Philippine 
problem, not for lack of it but because it was 
unequally distributed. Over half of the land is 
potentially arable; only 15 percent is cultivated. 
The average Filipino farmer had only three acres. 
The population was concentrated in parts of Luzon 
and the central islands. Before the Japanese came, 
the Commonwealth Government had begun a 
resettlement movement from the overcrowded 
areas to more sparsely settled regions. 

The People 

There are 16,350,000 Filipinos. They are mainly 
of Malay descent, with some admixture of Spanish 
and Chinese. They speak 87 distinct—but re¬ 
lated—languages and dialects. One of these— 
Tagalog—is now the national language and is 
taught together with English. Some Filipinos, 
especially in official and social circles, also speak 
Spanish—the heritage of 300 years of Spanish rule 
in the islands. 

They are small, sturdy people—warm, hospita¬ 
ble, and gay, fond of color, gifted musically. The 
younger generation has been brought up in the 
American tradition: they have been taught by 
American teachers in schools much like those of the 
United States; they read American books and 
magazines and use American slang. 

The Filipinos are proud of being the only Chris¬ 
tian nation in the Far East; 90 percent of them 
profess Christianity, two-thirds being Roman 
Catholics. Perhaps 5 percent are Moslems: these 
are the Moros, who live in parts of Mindanao and 
in the Sulu and Jolo Islands. The remaining 5 
percent worship the native gods of their pre-Con¬ 
quest ancestors. 

The Commonwealth 

The Filipinos are also proud of having estab¬ 
lished, with the help of the United States, the only 
democratic republican government along Western 
lines in the Orient. In 1872 Filipinos revolted 
after three centuries of Spanish rule, during which 
the 43 different tribal groups had come gradually 
to recognize that they were all Filipinos. In 1896 
they revolted again, and yet again—the second time 


35 


in protest against the execution of their national 
hero, Jose Rizal. In 1898, after Dewey had 
defeated the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay, Filipino 
revolutionaries tried to set up an independent 
republic, but finally made their peace with the 
United States. It was generally felt that the masses 
of the Filipino people were not quite ready for self- 
government. 

The first United States Commission sent to the 
Philippines was directed by President McKinley 
to “bear in mind that the government which they 
are establishing is designed not for our satisfaction, 
but for the happiness, peace, and prosperity of the 
Philippine Islands.” Accordingly, in the next 35 
years, American administration in the Philippines 
introduced free primary schools and health control, 
dug artesian wells, built roads and bridges and 
strung telegraph wires from Luzon to Mindanao. 
But above all the Filipinos were encouraged to 
manage their own local affairs, and were brought 
as rapidly as possible into the administration of 
their own islands. 

The culmination of this process of education for 
self-government was the creation of tlte Common¬ 
wealth of the Philippines in 1935, a 10-year 
intermediate stage before complete independence. 
The Commonwealth has its own Constitution, 
drawn up by the Filipinos’ own duly elected 
representatives. As Japan’s intentions in the Far 
East became more threatening, some Filipinos felt 


that it might be wise to ask for dominion status 
under the continued protection of the United 
States. But the first President of the Philippines, 
Don Manuel Quezon, has never abandoned his 
stand in favor of complete independence. His 
reelection, in November 1941, by an overwhelming 
majority established beyond doubt—in the words 
of one Filipino writer—that “rightly or wrongly, 
the Filipino masses believe in independence.” 

This independence of which they had dreamed 
for 70 years, the Filipinos would have achieved in 
4 more years. With the fall of Bataan, the dream 
was shattered. But only temporarily. 

Though its islands are occupied by the Japanese, 
the Commonwealth of the Philippines fights on, 
as a member of the United Nations. The Phil¬ 
ippines’ President Quezon on the Pacific War 
Council in Washington, the Philippines’ Captain 
Villamor with the United Nations fighting forces 
in Australia, and the formation of Filipino units in 
the United States Army are evidences of that fact. 
The Filipinos are fighting with America, as 
President Quezon has said, “in defense of our 
liberties, for attainment of independence, in 
defense of freedom and justice everywhere, and for 
the right of all peoples to be masters of their 
destiny.” President Roosevelt has pledged “the 
entire resources, in men and material, of the 
United States” that the Filipino people shall be 
masters of theirs. 


POLAND 


Area. —150,000 square miles. Population. —(1939) 35,100,000. Capital. —War¬ 
saw (temporary seat of government—London). President. —Wladyslaw Raczkie- 
wicz. Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief. —General Wladyslaw Sikorski. 
Chief cities. —Warsaw, Lodz, Lwow, Poznan, Wilno, Cracow. Chief products.— 
Wheat, oats, rye, barley, potatoes, sugar beets, lumber, coal, oil, textiles. Fighting 
forces. —Army, 500,000. Navy was five submarines, four new destroyers, three old 
ones. Now stronger, through Anglo-American replacements and additions. 


O N SEPTEMBER 1, 1939, Adolf Hitler ordered 
his armies to attack Poland, and began a 
war which has spread to all the continents and all 
the oceans. 

Hitler was strong; the Poles were not. In 4 weeks 
the campaign was over; the war was not. The 
defense of Gdynia—the heroic resistance at War¬ 


saw—these are remembered among Poles as Ameri¬ 
cans remember Bataan. 

The Poles have many such memories. Theirs is 
a history of struggle against oppression. For a 
hundred and nineteen years before the last war 
Poland was three ways divided under the German, 
Russian, and Austrian Empires. But the Polish 


36 


national anthem, written in those other 'days of 
Polish suffering, is “Poland Is Not Yet Lost.” 

That anthem is still sung. The Poles have not 
surrendered. They have signed no armistice. 
The Polish Government, under General Sikorsky 
is in London, and under its leadership about 
200,000 Poles who have escaped the conqueror’s 
grasp are now in active service against Hitler—an 
army corps in Scotland, 12,000 men in the R. A. F., 
an army in the Middle East, and another in Russia. 

Nor have the horrible cruelties of the Nazi con¬ 
queror broken the spirit of the people still in 
Poland. The Polish Government estimates that 
Polish war dead in 1939 numbered 200,000 
About 1,200,000 Poles have been transported to 
Germany to work at forced labor. At least a 
million more have died of starvation, disease, and 
the concentration camp. Yet the Poles still resist. 
Their treasures of art and culture have been 
destroyed. Most of the private property in western 
Poland has been confiscated. But under the noses 
of their oppressor the Poles still publish about 100 
secret newspapers. They still fight in small 
guerrilla detachments in Poland. They still strike 
at Hitler wherever they get the chance, derailing 
trainloads of Nazis, dropping emery dust in Nazi 
machines. 

Poland, the land for which these brave men 
fight, was before the war the sixth nation of Europe 
in population and size—a land smaller than 
California, with five times as many people. The 
heart of the country is the great central plain, the 
historic Vistula River basin. Here were most of 
the Poles, living mainly* by agriculture—three out 
of five of the people of the country lived on the land. 
Southwest were the coal mines, backbone of 
Polish industry—southeast the oilfields coveted by 
Germany. Eastward lay the famous Polesie 



marshes, great forests, and the farming land where 
White Russians and Ukrainians were more 
numerous. North was the province of Pomorze, 
giving Poland access to the sea—“the Polish 
Corridor” as the Germans called it. 

A nation with a past—in science, with Coper¬ 
nicus and Madame Curie, in music with Chopin 
and Paderewski, in statecraft with Casimir the 
Great, John Sobieski, and Kosciusko. 

A nation that worked mightily with mighty 
problems after its rebirth in 1918—repairing the 
devastation of a war fought on its land, and not 
ended until 1921—pulling together the people 
freed from three different empires—starting from 
scratch to build a modern state. 

And a nation with a future. For that future the 
Poles are fighting. In common purpose with the 
other United Nations and in special comradeship 
with their neighbors, Czechs and Russians, they 
are fighting. “Poland Is Not Yet Lost.” 


EL SALVADOR 


S MALLEST country in size on the American 
continents—“small and sweet as a lump of 
sugar”—El Salvador is a land of only 13,000 square 
miles with a population of 1,811,000 people, most 
of whom" earn their living from the soil. Almost 
all the land is cultivated, even to the sides of the 
volcanoes that push their cones into the tropical sky. 
Although El Salvador is a volcanic land—tw r o 


mountain ranges march the full length of the coun¬ 
try—the landscape itself is soft and smiling. Gentle 
plateaus and valleys lie between the ranges, among 
them the rich valley of the River Lempa, the great¬ 
est river flowing into the Pacific between Mexico 
and Cape Horn. El Salvador has a dry season, or 
summer, running from November to April, and a 
wet season, or winter, during the rest of the year. 


37 



There is a brief dry spell—the veramllo or little 
summer—in August, when Salvadorans plant their 
next year’s crops. In the old days, it was the cus¬ 
tom in El Salvador never to fight a war or revolu¬ 
tion during the veranillo. Both sides would lay down 
their arms, and return home to plant the earth. 

Perhaps more than any other country, El Salva¬ 
dor has been a one-product nation, famous for its 
excellent coffee. It is the world’s fourth producer 
of coffee. Although 80 to 90 percent of its export 
rade is in coffee, El Salvador has recently been 
attempting to diversify its agricultural products. 
It produces sugar cane, grains, and “balsam of 
Peru,” an essential healing antiseptic obtained from 
a species of balsam tree which grows nowhere in 
the world but a section of El Salvador called the 
“Balsam Coast.” An important product during 
wartime is henequen, used for the manufacture of 
sacks and ropes, and as a substitute for hemp. 

But it is coffee that has made El Salvador a pros¬ 
perous and united nation. It was not until the 
fast quarter of the 19th century that farseeing 
planters began to appreciate the vast possibilities 
of growing coffee in El Salvador. Although many 
of the plantations were at low altitude, they were 
near the coast, thus making transportation costs 
relatively cheap. Large-scale coffee plantations 
set the pace for El Salvador, but there soon^de- 
veloped thousands of small, individual plantations. 
In 1939, for example, 11,545 coffee plantations 
were owned by 10,921 proprietors and covered 
202,432 acres. Perhaps it is these numerous indi¬ 
vidual holdings that have given the Salvadorans 
a firm love of homeland and great skill in utilizing 
their natural resources. Prosperity arising from 
coffee planting is responsible in great measure for 
the new buildings, automobile highways, and ex¬ 


tension of railroads that have made El Salvador a 
progressive modern nation. 

El Salvador’s population is more than 90 percent 
Ladino —mixed Indian and white blood. Unlike 
the Guatemalan Indian, who lives an isolated life 
in his own village, has his own primitive economy, 
and his own Maya dialect, the Salvadoran Indian 
has been assimilated into the national life. He may 
be poor and have only a small patch of land, but 
he is conscious of his nationality, and is likely to 
work in one of the towns as an artisan. He speaks 
Spanish; the Indian dialects have vanished. 

El Salvador has a healthy tradition of political 
democracy. One of its greatest heroes is Father 
Jose Simeon Can as, whose fervent plea for the 
abolition of slavery before the Constituent As¬ 
sembly of the Central American Federation in 
1823 still stands as a landmark in Salvadoran and 
Central American history. A sick man, Father 
Canas rose before the Assembly to say: “I come 
with feeble steps, but even were I at death’s door, 
from death’s door would I come to propose to you 
a measure on behalf of helpless human beings ... 
I beseech you, before you do anything else, to pro¬ 
claim in today’s session the emancipation of our 
brothers in slavery ... we all know that our 
brothers have been violently deprived of the ines¬ 
timable gift of liberty, that they groan in servitude, 
sighing for a kindly hand to break the bonds of 
slavery . . . The entire nation has been declared 
free; so should be the individuals who compose it.” 
Forthwith freedom for the slaves was written into 
the new constitution—the first national emancipa¬ 
tion measure in continental America, and one 
passed a good forty years before the slaves were 
freed in the United States. 

El Salvador has a constitution that guarantees 
freedom of speech, religion, and press. Voting is 
compulsory for men, optional for women. El Sal¬ 
vador has now for its President General Maximil- 
iano Hernandez Martinez, who has fortified the 
country’s financial position. Under him El Salva¬ 
dor has an excellent road-building and public- 
works record. 

El Salvador defied the Axis in 1940, forbidding 
all anti-democratic propaganda and expelling the 
German Consul. In June 1941, El Salvador shut 
down a secret Nazi radio station which was in touch 
with German agents throughout Central America. 
Immediately after Pearl Harbor, El Salvador de¬ 
clared war on the Axis. 


38 



SOUTH AFRICA 


Area. —472,550 square miles. Population. —2,152,000 whites, 6,600,000 
natives (Negroes), 770,000 mixed, 220,000 from India. Capital. —Pretoria, 
Transvaal. Cape Town, however, is the seat of. Parliament. Principal cities.— 
Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban. Products. —Gold, diamonds, asbestos, 
copper, chrome, manganese, iron ore, platinum, fruits, cotton, corn, wheat. Flag.— 
Blue, white, and orange, with a miniature Union Jack and the flags of the Boer states* 
Transvaal and Orange Free State in the center. Armed forces. —190,000 (including 
30,000 Negro troops). Form of government. —Self-governing Dominion of the 
British Empire. 



J UTTING SOUTHWARD into the sea some 
7,800 miles from New York and washed by 
the water of two great oceans lies the Cape of 
Good Hope. This jagged, rocky peninsula meant 
“Good Hope” to the hardy mariners of the 15th 
century who were seeking the fabled riches of 
India. “Good Hope” this peninsula promises 
today to the ships of the United Nations. Round 
the Cape go vast convoys of men and arms from 
Britain and America to Libya, India, Australia, 
and other batdegrounds, stopping at Cape Town, 
once called the “tavern of the seas,” to take on 
supplies or to leave ships and weapons for repair. 
The Cape stands as one of the vital bastions of the 
fight for freedom. 

The Country 

Much of South Africa is like Texas and our west¬ 
ern prairies—land that is fairly high, dry, and cov¬ 
ered with sparse foliage; much is wasteland, barren 


and waterless. The country is something like an 
overturned saucer, with a narrow coastal belt fring¬ 
ing the sea; thence a steep escarpment and moun¬ 
tainous ridges and finally a great central plateau. 
Practically no harbors or ports break the bleak 
monotony of the western seacoast and only a few— 
Cape Town, Mossel Bay, Port Elizabeth, East Lon¬ 
don, and Durban—are to be found along the 
Indian Ocean side. 

South Africa is still a frontier country, its farmers 
and cattle growers living close to the soil. Most of 
its towns are small and isolated. Only the rugged 
mining town of Johannesburg, the busy wharves of 
Cape Town, and the urbane English atmosphere of 
Durban reflect the changes of the 20th century. 

Racial Issues 

The first Dutch and IJnglish settled along the 
Indian Ocean. The English stayed in and near the 
ports in order to conduct their trading and banking 
interests; the Dutch farmers—called Boers—trekked 
through the mountain passes into the greener pas¬ 
tures that later became the Orange Free State and 
the Transvaal. 

Today the descendants of the original Dutch 
settlers—now called Afrikaners—account for about 
56 percent of the white population and the British 
about 39 percent. Both Afrikaans and English are 
recognized as official languages. 

Political Issues 

The political division within the Union might 
have proved extremely serious had it not been for 
a great soldier-statesman, Jan Christiaan Smuts, 
who fought against the British in the Boer War 


39 



and for them in the first World War and who 
helped Woodrow Wilson draft the covenant of 
the League of Nations. While a member of the 
British War Cabinet he induced Lloyd George to 
establish the R. A. F. as a separate unit, and had 
the prophetic vision that in the future mass attacks 
from the air on populous industrial centers would 
become an important part of war. General 
Smuts assumed control in South Africa in Sep¬ 
tember 1939, after the cabinet had split down the 
middle on the war issue and after Prime Minister 
Hertzog, another veteran of the Boer War, had 
been defeated in the House on his resolution for 
neutrality. 

The War Effort 

South Africa’s industry plans to produce 600,000 

THE SOVI 

O N SUNDAY, June 22, 1941, without warning, 
the Nazi armies attacked the Soviet Union. 
For almost 6 months, in a series of tremendous 
battles, they advanced into Russia, assisted by 
their subservient “allies,” until they stood at the 
gates of Moscow. But in December they were 
stopped, and from December through the Russian 
winter they were forced back. In the words of 
Douglas MacArthur, the Red Army had managed 
“the greatest military achievement in all history.” 
The mightiest army of all time, attacking by sur¬ 
prise at the peak of its strength, was fought and 
punished, stopped and thrown back. More than 
one-fifth of the land overrun by the invader was 
liberated. Literally millions of Nazis were put out 
of action. How was it done? 

First, the Soviet Union is big. It was as big in 
June 1941 as all of North America. A land of 
endless plains and forests, a land of rich mines and 
productive oil wells, of Arctic wastes and Central 
Asian mountain peaks, of great modern cities and 
still more modern factories. A big country, with 
a people like our own who like bigness. A coun¬ 
try that has everything: iron, coaL, electric power, 
oil, grain, even rubber—everything, and lots of it. 
A land that stretches 5,000 miles from Central 
Europe to the Pacific Ocean. 

And the Soviet Union is many people, over 


tons of steel yearly; it builds armored cars, artil¬ 
lery, rifles, bombs, shells, bullets, uniforms, shoes, 
and many other necessities of war. One out of 
every seven white men is in the armed forces. A 
large proportion of these men have fought valiantly 
in East Africa, where today they are aiding in the 
defense of Egypt. South Africa’s planes, manned 
by graduates of 24 training schools, and a small 
navy of patrol boats are guarding the vital sea 
lanes to the Cape. Conscription is limited to 
service within southern Africa and the government 
has promised that no Union troops will be sent 
outside African territory. Yet many thousands 
of English and Afrikaner volunteers are standing 
shoulder to shoulder on the sands of Egypt 
and will continue to do so until victory is 
won. 


ET UNION 

170,000,000 at the last census. A hundred million 
Russians, 30 million Ukrainians, and others of 50 
different racial strains. Four-fifths in Europe, one- 
fifth in Asia—a great people, European and Asiatic, 
but mostly Russian. 

The Soviet Union is chiefly the work of men. 
The product of history, revolution, suffering, and 
struggle, human will and astounding achievement. 

For 300 years before 1917 Russia was the Empire 
of the Romanovs—out of the mixed people of 
eastern Europe and northern Asia they forged a 
great land empire, rooted in autocracy, brutal and 
backward by Western standards, but massively 
strong. This was the nation that crushed Na¬ 
poleon’s hopes, the nation that trembled between 
foreign war and home unrest for 50 years before 
1917—and then went through a most violent revolu¬ 
tion to emerge as the world’s first avowedly Socialist 
state, first under Lenin and then under Stalin. 

While the civil war was still in progress, work for 
the construction of a new state was begun. Russia 
became Socialist—all industry and all commerce 
owned by the state—all farms collectively owned. 
Private property? Yes, private homes and per¬ 
sonal possessions, private bank accounts, private 
incomes—and taxes—but no private business as 
we know it in America and no private land. It 
was a new pattern. 


40 


Millions suffered. “You cannot make a revolu¬ 
tion with silk gloves,” said the Russians. But 
there was new freedom too. There is no race 
prejudice now; all the scores of peoples keep their 
own languages, their own traditions. A man 
stands on his own abilities, and all men are citizens. 
Women have fully equal rights; thousands of them 
serve today in government, in industry, and in the 
Red Army.. The right of education is being ex¬ 
tended to all the people. Russia, under whatever 
system, must move out of a time far back—out of 
centuries of dark oppression. It is a long and 
mighty work. 

The biggest job of the Soviet Union was to build 
its industry. In the great successive Five-Year 
Plans begun in 1928 that job was done. Steel out¬ 
put was doubled and redoubled; electric power was 
multiplied. Machines were made for the farm and 
the oil field, for the factory and for the army. 
Russia between two wars became the second indus¬ 
trial nation of Europe, close behind Germany, 
rebuilding what was wrecked in the revolution 
and pressing fiercely forward. 

That meant sacrifice. Ruthlessly the Russians 
chose to have more factories and not more clothes 
and comforts. They remade Russian agriculture 
from small peasant holdings into huge collective 
farms. Farm production in the last years before 
war reached new highs, and the path was clear 
for even greater progress. Russia solidly en¬ 
trenched herself as the world’s leading agricultural 
country: easily first in wheat and rye and barley 
and oats. 

And the Russians prepared for war. They were 
between the Nazis and Japan, no place for a weak 
sister. The Red Army grew until it numbered 2% 
million men, with 12 million trained reserves and 
more millions on tap. Russian arms also grew— 
tanks, guns, planes by thousands and factories for 
more thousands—scores of submarines for the 
Pacific, a modernized fleet for the Baltic and the 
Black Sea—all these were prepared against the 
rising menace of attack. 

The Russians got ready. They were big and 
many and strong. They were a young people: a 
hundred and ten million of them were under 30, 
knowing only the new Russia. For the new Russia, 
as Russians and as Socialists, they were ready to 


fight and suffer and die. Which they are doing. 

Some say the Socialist State did it. Others say 
it was the age-old Russian. spirit. Wiser men 
know it was both. Americans know the Com¬ 
munist system, and they do not want it for them¬ 
selves, but to the youth and unity and fighting skill 
of the Soviet people they can and do send their 
salute. 

The war has been unbelievably hard for Russia. 
Half a million square miles of her land were over¬ 
run. Her third and fourth cities were taken, her 
two largest, Moscow and Leningrad, besieged and 
battered. Tens of millions of her people are still 
under the invader’s heel. Millions of her finest 
young men are dead or wounded. The “scorched 
earth” policy, applied by both sides, has destroyed 
untold Russian wealth. The defiance of the 
Russians, blowing up their own hard-built dams 
and wrecking their own mines, was outdone only 
by the fury of the baffled Nazis, burning and 
slaughtering last winter in retreat. 

The Russians are still fighting, on the 2,000-mile 
front, in the great factories, and behind the enemy 
lines. They know their cause is just, and they 
know that they will win. As President Roosevelt 
has said, “Russian forces have destroyed and are 
destroying more armed power of our enemies— 
troops, planes, tanks, and guns—than all the other 
United Nations put together.” 



41 



THE UNITED KINGDOM 


These Make Britain Great 

The Melting Pot. Like the United States, Great Britain is a melting pot. 
Unlike the United States, the melting pot has had a thousand years in which to 
simmer gently. Britain’s 41 million English and Welsh, 5 million Scots and \)\ 
million Ulstermen have strains of Roman, Celt, Saxon, Norse, Danish, Norman, 
and Huguenot blood. 

The English Channel. . . only 20 miles wide makes Britain an island cut off 
from Europe yet part of Europe; free to develop her own democratic government—• 
one of the best yet devised; her own public opinion—strong and vocal; her own 
poetry—a hymn to freedom. 

The Gulf Stream. . . lots of rain and mist, no extremes of heat or cold—a 
lush, green, gentle countryside helps to make a moderate people: reasonable, temper¬ 
ate, hating extremes. There has been no successful invasion, of Britain since 1066; 
no civil war since 1660. 

The Empire. . . explored, settled, built up by Britons, feeds Britain, and Britain’s 
industries feed the Empire. The Empire’s arteries and veins depend upon the 
freedom of the seas. 


War Aim 

“We are fighting to save the whole world 
from the pestilence of Nazi tyranny, and in 
defense of all that is most sacred to man.”—■ 
Winston Churchill on Sunday, September 3, 
1939. 

B Y NATURE a sane and moderate people, the 
British hated going to war. But at the same 
time they welcomed the decision with an over¬ 
whelming sense of relief. This paradox was the 
result of the nightmare of alternating shocks and 
humiliations in which the people had lived since 
Hitler came to power. Step by step the tyrant had 
turned their orderly world into a madhouse. The 
release from nightmare into reality, however grim, 
was a release of the national will and spirit. 

Their darkest hour came in the spring of 1940, 
with the sudden collapse of Holland, Belgium, and 
France. In that hour Britain faced the Fascist 
world alone. Winston Churchill, now Prime 
Minister, again spoke for the people when he said, 
“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and 
so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and 
its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men 
will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’ ” 
History may well place that judgment on the 
story of Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain which 
followed. The immediate task was to rescue 
350,000 men—the shattered remnants of the British 

42 


and French armies—from the beaches of Dunkirk. 
On May 29 the evacuation was begun. By June 4 
the job was done. 

The next job was to prepare against a Nazi 
invasion. That summer of 1940 Britons worked as 
they had never worked before. Their factories 
had to replace the vast quantities of weapons and 
equipment left on the fields and beaches of 
Flanders. Britain had to be converted into a 
fortress to repel invasion. Road signs came down, 
pillboxes went up. The cliffs and beaches became 
a maze of barbed wire and gun emplacements. 
The British had little time. On August 8 the 
Germans began intensive daylight raids on 
England—the “softening up” process preliminary 
to invasion. Their objects were, of course, to 
demoralize production and civilian life, and to 
drive the R. A. F. out of the skies over Britain. 
In both of these objectives the Nazis failed. 

The Battle of Britain, the greatest air battle in 
history, lasted from August 8 to October 31, 1940. 
It cost the Germans 2,375 planes destroyed in 
daylight alone, and many more at night. On one 
day, September 15, 185 German planes were 
brought down over England. The battle of 
Britain cost the British 375 pilots killed and 358 
wounded; 14,281 civilians killed and 20,325 
wounded. But war production went on. This 
was because British workers soon decided to stay 


at their machines and benches during raids. 
Indifferent to the throb of planes and the thud of 
bombs, they worked furiously, 56—64—and even 
up to 80 hours a week until exhaustion forced 
them to limit the hours of work. 

After October 31 the German squadrons aban¬ 
doned mass daylight raids. But they continued to 
pound away at night until the following June when 
the British night flyer and radio detector made 
the cost too high. 

The Battle of Britain was won. The German 
invasion was foiled. A handful of young R. A. F. 
flyers had saved Europe and perhaps the world 
from destruction. Again Winston Churchill spoke 
for his people: “Never in the field of human con¬ 
flict was so much owed by so many to so few.” 

Foiled in his plans to invade Britain, Hitler 
turned south and east, and the British began to 
fight campaigns far from home—in Greece, Crete, 
Libya, Iraq, Syria, and Iran—determined to 
strike at the enemy wherever he could be reached. 
As a result both of these campaigns and of Russia’s 
magnificent stand, Suez and the oilfields of the 
Middle East remained outside Hitler’s grasp. 

' Meanwhile Britain was fighting another de¬ 
fensive war on the Atlantic against the fierce 
German submarine campaign. Again the Ger¬ 
mans failed in their objectives—to cut Britain off 
from her Empire and the United States. 

Two and a half years of defensive warfare, of 
delaying actions, of retreating, outnumbered and 
out-equipped by the enemy, of playing for time, 
of making hard choices between reinforcing one or 
another hard-pressed front—these years of defeat 



and discouragement might have broken the spirit 
of a people less dogged and determined than the 
British. Sheer stamina carried them through this 
period of reverses. Sheer stamina kept the people 
at work producing planes and more planes, until, 
in the spring of 1942, R. A. F. squadrons mastered 
the skies over Germany as well as over Britain. 
Then for the first time the magic word “offensive” 
was on the people’s lips, not as a far-off hope, but 
as a reality. 

The offensive began, modest but daring. It 
began with a series of Commando raids on the 
German-held coasts of Norway and France. Small 
bands of picked men of the Army, Navy, and Air¬ 
force, with perfect teamwork, surprised German 
garrisons, blew up radio stations, docks, and oil 
tanks, and made off with prisoners. 

The offensive continued, daring but no longer 
modest. It continued with the mass R. A. F. 
attacks on Liibeck, Rostock, Cologne, and Essen. 
Rotterdam and Coventry were at last avenged as 
waves of British-built planes, more than a thousand 
in a night, descended upon German centers of 
shipping and industry. The 1,036 planes which 
leveled Cologne were made in British plants. 

The British promised to return regularly and to 
bring American squadrons with them. The Battle 
of Germany had begun. 

Britain today is immeasurably stronger at home 
than ever before, after 3 years of war during 
which she has borne the brunt of the battle on 
many fronts. 

Britain’s armies have fought ten campaigns and 
garrisoned strategic bases such as Iceland, Malta, 
Gibraltar, India, and the Middle East. 

Britain’s fighting forces have suffered 183,500 
casualties—71 percent of all the Empire dead and 
wounded. 

Britain’s Navy, with never less than 600 ships at 
sea, has sunk five and one-fourth million tons of 
enemy merchant shipping and convoyed 100,000 
United Nations ships with losses of only one-half 
of 1 percent of these convoys. 

Britain’s Air Force fought and won the Battle of 
Britain; its Coastal Command has flown more than 
50 million miles. 

Britain’s factory workers produced, in 1941, 
twice as many finished weapons as the United 
States—exporting 5 planes to every 1 imported, 
15 tanks to every 1 imported. 


•% 


43 


Britain’s people are contributing almost 60 per¬ 
cent of the national income for war. This means 
giving up all luxuries and many necessities—a 
drastic reduction in the standard of living. The 
British income-tax rate, always high, is imposing 
a severe burden on the people. A married man 
with two children earning $2,400 in 1941 paid 
about $480 in income taxes, as compared with the 
American of similar income who paid $6. Under 
existing rates in Britain, it is virtually impossible 
lor any one to have more than $20,000 left after 
paying his taxes, no matter how large his income. 
• • • 

During the year in which Britain and her Empire 
faced the Nazi world alone, her island became a 
haven lor the free governments in exile and the 
fugitives from conquered nations whose sole idea 


YUGOS 



Rise, O Serbians, swift arise, 

Lift your banners to the skies, 

For your country needs her children. 

Fight to make her free. 

Rise, O rise, and crush our enemy, 

Rise and fight for liberty. 

Free the Sav and Duna flow, 

Let us too unfettered go. 

O’er the wild Moravian mountains. 

Swift shall flow sweet Freedom’s fountains, 
Down shall sink the foe. 

(0, Serbia —Yugoslav National Song) 


was to go on with the battle against the Axis. Fol¬ 
lowing in the footsteps of Benes and the Czechs 
came the representatives of Free Poland, Free 
Norway, Free Holland, Free Belgium, Free France, 
Free Luxembourg, Free Greece, and Free Yugo¬ 
slavia. All found refuge in London, where they 
pooled their remaining resources in the service of 
the United Nations. 

Britain became the training ground for the free 
legions of all these countries. Polish and Dutch 
fliers, Czech, Belgian, and French soldiers, Nor¬ 
wegian, Greek, and Dutch seamen all found their 
chance to serve freedom in Britain. 

In her long history Britain has fought a succes¬ 
sion of European tyrants—among them her own 
Charles the First, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Wilhelm 
II, and Hitler. That great tradition is being 
carried on today. 

LAVIA 

L OVE OF FREEDOM as expressed in its 
A national anthem is the force that makes 
Yugoslavia’s story one of alternate submergence 
and revival. Slavic tribes coming from southern 
Poland and western Russia to make new homes on 
the southern part of the Balkan Peninsula in the 
5th and 6th centuries enjoyed first prosperity under 
independent sovereigns, then years of eclipse and 
foreign domination. Their heroes fought the 
Byzantines, Turks, Magyars, Italians, and Ger¬ 
mans; their exploits are preserved in rich folk sagas. 

In the 17th and 18th centuries bands of Balkan 
peasants called Hajduks fought foreign oppressors 
in guerrilla fashion. Later, as nationalistic feelings 
were roused, such peasant rebels adopted definite 
political aims, central headquarters, and a new 
name— Chetniks. They were guerrillas in the Balkan 
War of 1912 and were very active throughout 
World War I which began on Serbian soil. 

The Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated June 
28, 1914, on a street in Sarajevo by a young student. 
One month later Austrian guns fired on Belgrade 
the first shells of the war which was to wreck the 
Austro-Hungarian empire and fulfill the national 
aspirations of the South Slav people. On Decem¬ 
ber 1, 1918, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and 
Slovenes, later named Yugoslavia (Land of the 
South Slavs), was born from the voluntary union 


44 


of Serbia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Croatia, Dalmatia, and 
Montenegro. Its capital is Belgrade, its area 
95,558 square miles, and its population 16,000,000. 

In this country, about the size of the British 
Isles, large, rich valleys of the north change grad¬ 
ually into snowy mountains covered with forests. 
Nearly a third of the land is forests and through 
them flow many rivers, including the famous 
Danube and Sava, which make the soil fertile. 
More than half of it is cultivated by a predomi¬ 
nantly peasant population. Cattle raising, forestry, 
and farming combined occupy 85 percent of the 
people. 

When his father was assassinated in 1934, 11-year- 
old Peter II of Yugoslavia became Europe’s young¬ 
est king. A three-man regency council handled 
affairs of state. Great national progress was being 
made when the Yugoslavs began to see despotic 
powers overrunning the world and Nazi hordes 
massing at their very door. 

Though they had scant military protection, the 
Yugoslavs’ traditional spirit of resistance to oppres¬ 
sion rose against the enemy’s cruelly persuasive 
arguments for submission. The regency faltered 
and a weak cabinet even signed a pact with Hitler, 
but the people themselves rose swiftly during the 
night of March 27, 1941, to stage a bloodless revolu¬ 
tion which swept the Axis-controlled government 
from office, set up a new cabinet under General 
Simovitch, and gave young King Peter, now seven¬ 
teen years old, full regal powers. 

So the nation, poor in the instruments of war, 
fought desperately against tremendous odds, at¬ 
tacked not only by Germans, Bulgarians, and 
Italians but also by Hungarians who a few weeks 
before had signed a pact of “perpetual friendship” 
with their Yugoslav neighbors. On the battlefield 
barehanded soldiers attacked armored tanks, but 
the enemy rolled relentlessly into hills and valleys. 
After the Axis occupation came partition. No 
other European state has become spoil for so many 
aggressors. Hitler reserved the most important 
portion for himself; the rest was given to Italy, 
Bulgaria, Hungary, and a puppet Croatian ruler, 
Ante Pavelich. 

But these new oppressors won only the physical 
outline of a country whose people, for the most part, 


are today united in support of their King and Gov¬ 
ernment, now in London. Three months after the 
debacle the army was reorganized by General 
Draja Mikhailovitch from troops who, like himself, 
had fled to the hills rather than surrender. Mik- 
hailovitch’s men are modern Chetniks who fight 
where they can, destroying troop concentrations, 
burning storehouses, wrecking transportation and 
supplies. Their women and children and old peo¬ 
ple assist in countless ways, particularly by keeping 
communications moving between groups of Chetniks. 

The bold thoroughness of Yugoslav resistance 
has brought great suffering. A wave of executions 
by the Nazis followed the invasion and a second 
wave came in reply to the escape of Yugoslav naval 
units through the Strait of Otranto. (These units 
now fight with the British.) German punitive 
expeditions into Kragujevac and Kraljevo killed an 
estimated 7,000 men and boys—entire classes of 
high-school students, their teachers, and other 
townsmen. The Government of Yugoslavia in 
London reports that henchmen of the traitorous 
Ante Pavelich and Axis invaders murdered more 
than 300,000 persons in the Bosnia region; in 
Nazi-occupied zones hundreds of thousands of 
Slovenes, including children separated from their 
parents, w r ere driven from their homes in freezing 
weather and became wandering refugees. Thou¬ 
sands more were forcibly sent to Germany and 
Axis-occupied portions of Poland and the Soviet 
Union. 

Whole forests have been burned down by Ger¬ 
man command to force the Chetniks into the open; 
death is often the penalty for women and children 
who give so much as a drink of water to these 
soldiers. 

Yet the terror does not stop the fighting. From 
mountains and forests new sorties go out daily to 
harass the several divisions of Axis troops which 
the Axis has found it necessary to keep in Yugo¬ 
slavia. Mikhailovitch and his men are not too 
busy to make fun of the Germans. Once a group 
of Nazis were captured by Chetniks in an abandoned 
factory and sent back to German lines with a large 
red “V” painted on the seats of their trousers. 
There is always trouble for the puppet ruler, 
Pavelich; he is trying to dominate not only the 


45 


hostile Croatian Peasant Party under Dr. Vladimir 
Machek but also some 2 million rebellious Serbs. 

While plundering Axis soldiers keep themselves 
well supplied, citizens and their Chetniks in the hills 
do without many things. But their ability to get 
along on practically nothing and their fighting 
spirit are the two things which make the Yugoslav 


library of congress 


men, women, and children s 
These same qualities explain t 
of an ancient military custon 
Yugoslavia—citizens passing e, 
street and Armv commanders saluting their troops 


0 015 791 240 9 


use the same greeting: “Bog vam pomogao junaci!” 
which means “God’s help to you, heroes!” 


9 


The Thousand Million 

For additional copies 9 write Office of War Information 9 
Washington 9 O. €. 


OFFICE OF WAR INFORMATION Penalty for Private Use to Avoid 

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